Actress Chrissy Metz stole the hearts of audiences everywhere with her performance as the lovable Kate Pearson in NBC’s This Is Us. A big part of Kate’s story was her indelible relationship with Toby Damon. The couple shared both beautiful ups and heartbreaking downs before ultimately choosing to end their relationship as husband and wife. However, did you know Metz herself was once married—and her relationship with her ex carries many parallels to Kate and Toby’s story?
Kate And Toby’s Bittersweet Ending
NBC’s wildly successful drama series This Is Us recently ended after six seasons on the air, leaving many to hope it receives an Emmy nod. True to its nature of flashing forward and backward in time, the show clued viewers into the fact that Kate and Toby (Chris Sullivan, whose voice you may recognize) wouldn’t stay married, but they didn’t share the circumstances of the pair’s split.
Metz sat down with People to discuss how she felt when she finally learned the details of Kate and Toby’s realization that their marriage was over, and she had some highly insightful things to say.
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“What’s so bittersweet is that Kate and Toby were exactly the right people to be together. There’s a reason why they did meet and they did fall in love and have this beautiful family. So you can’t take that away just because they’re not together in the future. I think we forget to take all the good away from a situation when we can only see the negative about it. But only in hindsight do we then know, ‘Oh, this was actually for the best.’ You just can’t always see that when you’re in the moment, it’s so beautiful in the way the story is told.”
Chrissy Metz’s Real-Life Toby
As it turns out, Metz’s words of wisdom are backed up by her own experience: she was married for seven years to freelance copywriter Martyn Eaden, whom she met online. The pair hit it off immediately, with Eaden traveling from the UK to the US to meet Metz and proposing to her within a year. However, Metz told Daily Mail, her family didn’t quite get along with her new beau.
What’s more is that Metz and Eaden both struggled in their relationships with food and took conflicting approaches to healing. This made Metz feel that she was unable to stay consistent with her health goals while in the marriage, so she joined a 12-step program. Unfortunately, this led to the realization that her marriage wasn’t working. The couple’s divorce was finalized in 2015, but they still stay in close contact and remain friends, much like Kate and Toby.
The parallels between Kate’s marriage and her own are not lost on Metz. Of her divorce, she shared, “It was really hard because much like Kate and Toby…you love each other. We find faults. But you know, you’re not growing together; you’re growing apart… But I love him, and I’m always checking in on him. I am still working on being a better ex-wife than I was a wife.”