Patton Oswalt and Meredith Salenger’s romance seems practically fated.
Oswalt and Salenger married Nov. 4 in front of family, friends and his 8-year-old daughter, Alice, in a Hollywood ceremony at Jim Henson Studios. The two first went public with their relationship in June, little more than a year after Oswalt’s late wife, Michelle McNamara, died suddenly in her sleep.
In a new interview with People magazine, Oswalt and Salenger opened up about how McNamara is unexpectedly and beautifully intertwined in their love for each other.
“When I first starting talking with Patton on Facebook, it was just sort of witty banter,” Salenger said. “There was nothing to it, but as I started getting to know him better, I looked up Michelle on Facebook and I saw that we had like 15 mutual friends. One of them was my best friend since 7th grade. I called her and was like, ‘Tell me about Michelle.’ She was best friends with Michelle after college. She was like, ‘I loved her. She’s amazing. She’s so funny and smart.’ ... When I met Patton and Alice, it just felt so, so right. I never thought I’d get married, but then I fell madly in love.”
Oswalt, who revealed that his new wife has bonded with his late wife’s family, did not expect to find that kind of love again.
“I’ve only ever felt that level of joy once before in my life, and it was so profound and perfect it felt greedy to ever wish for it again,” he said. “But I did, so now all I can do is show Meredith a level of gratitude and love that’s greater than the joy she’s brought me, and my daughter Alice. Because this is a new level of joy, and a new life, and I’ll always strive to deserve it.”
The comedian appeared on Wednesday’s episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live” and talked about how he and Salenger first connected, through their mutual friend, actress Martha Plimpton.
Oswalt missed a dinner party they were both invited to in February, and Salenger messaged him afterward on Facebook about the awesome lasagna he missed.
“We didn’t meet face to face until May 20,” he said. “So it was a very Victorian-like, exchanging-letters kind of romance. Every night we would just write back and forth about everything ― life, politics, books. We did all of the deep stuff you do after you have the first date. So, by the time we met on our first date, I was so head over heels.”
In April, Oswalt posted a touching tribute to McNamara on Facebook, one year after her death. He wrote that he decided to finally take off his wedding ring and place it in a box because it represented “the last symbol of denial of who I was now, and what my life is, and what my responsibilities are.”
Still, the ring is a symbol of the joy they shared.
I put the ring in this little box I’d had made, when Michelle and I moved out of the house we lived in together in Burbank ― first as boyfriend/girlfriend, then as fiancees, then as a married couple. When we moved into our new house I had the box made, and filled with it random trinkets and scraps of our life leading up to marriage. The first movie we went to after moving in with each other, the first movie premiere we went to, hotel keys and love notes and pictures.
Michelle brought me nothing but happiness. You see it in our faces, that picture between the two pics of the box. That was taken literally a month after we started going out. Look at us. We knew this was it.
So the ring goes with the happy stuff.
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