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They got engaged in September 2019.
By Amy Lamare and Olivia Jakiel — Written on Dec 11, 2020
Former Parks and Rec star Jenny Slate is pregnant!
During an appearance on The Late Show with Seth Myers on Dec. 10., the actress shared that she and her fiancé, Ben Shattuck, are expecting their first child together.
"Let me tell you, on night one of the lockdown, we had a really romantic night of being together, real sweet with my fiancé,” she said.
“And then I did what everyone else did. I kind of hunkered down and baked a lot of bread. But I just want to say I think I might have baked too much bread or eaten too much bread. You tell me, Seth," she continued, before showing off her baby bump.
“It’s different. I feel different,” she added. “Um, how have the exact last nine months been? They’ve been real pregnant for me.”
While Slate has risen to fame over the last few years, partly because of her on-and-off high-profile relationship with Chris Evans from 2016 to 2018, we're interested in learning more about her fiancé, Ben Shattuck.
Who is Jenny Slate's fiancé, Ben Shattuck?
Read on for all the details about Slate's man.
They met through friends.
It feels like everyone meets online these days, but Jenny met Ben offline, in the real world, through friends.
They lost touch after meeting until six months later when they ran into each other in New York City and exchanged email addresses.
In an interview, Jenny said, "I noticed that when I was writing to him, I really, really bloomed. When I wrote to him, I was my most real self."
She wrote him an email suggesting they become friends. And then: "A year and two days after that email he asked me to marry him.”
He's an Ivy League grad.
Ben Shattuck's website reveals that he's a 2008 graduate of Cornell University's College of Architecture, Art and Planning.
In 2013, he attended the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop. He's also shown his art in a number of galleries.
After one of his short stories was published in the 2017 edition of Pen America Best Debut Short Stories, he said, “I like to think of the people I personally know placed in deep history. I can never write in present day — a character always ends up carrying a lantern by page two.”
At the time he was writing a novel based on the diary of a 23-year-old farmer from the 1840s.
One line from the diary resonated with him particularly well: “Since I came to my years of understanding, I’ve found my place in the world uncertain.”
He proposed to Jenny in a castle in France.
Ben Shattuck is quite literally a real-life embodiment of the main male character in a romance novel.
Case in point — he took her to an abandoned castle in the south of France, made her a picnic and proposed. According to Jenny's Instagram she "screamed YES."
Ben posted about the proposal on his Instagram too, saying: “In an abandoned castle in southern France, I asked this woman to marry me. Here she is in front of a door the color of her soul."
He's a "well-adjusted feminist man."
Jenny Slate remarked that her relationship with Ben Shattuck is so healthy because he's a "well-adjusted feminist man."
She went on to say:
"He has truly never let me down. He's romantic and caring, and he treats me like the person that I know that I am. Because I hold him in such high regard, and he treats me like such a dear friend, I work on growing and changing in a way that doesn't involve shame.
It's just like, ‘Wow, I'm so excited that I can be myself with this person. And I seek to continue to expand.'”
They attended the Sundance Film Festival together in 2019.
One of the first public appearances for Slate and Shattuck was at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.
She was at the festival promoting her film The Sunlit Night. The couple was spotted out and about in Park City. Shattuck is Slate's first public relationship since her split from Chris Evans in May 2018. She and Captain America dated on and off for two years.
Jenny Slate moved to Massachusetts for him.
The Massachusetts natives — she grew up in the Boston suburb of Milton — live together in the home he grew up in, which is, of course, also in Massachusetts.
Slate announced her pregnancy on Dec. 10.
And from the looks of her baby bump, the Slate-Shattuck household will soon grow by one more!
Fans were elated at the surprise announcement, with one YouTuber writing, "Mazel Tov to Jenny and Ben!! I am so filled with joy for this wonderful inspiring woman."
Congrats to the parents-to-be!
Olivia Jakiel is an editor and writer who covers celebrity and entertainment news. Follow her on Instagram and keep up with her zingers on Twitter.
Amy Lamare is a Los Angeles based writer and editor covering entertainment, pop culture, beauty, fashion, fitness, technology, and the intersection of technology, business, and philanthropy. You can find her on Instagram and Facebook.