Rob McElhenney and Kaitlin Olson falling in love during the early seasons of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" is one of the great celebrity romances of our time.
The true sign of making it in Hollywood is when unfounded rumors start popping up about the sordid unraveling of a marriage due to infidelity. It took having two kids and a record-breaking 16 seasons of the FXX sitcom, but McElhenney and Olson have finally arrived.
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Gossip site Perez Hilton published a story this week citing a newsletter from celebrity rumor website DeuxMoi, which states that it "publishes rumors and conjecture, not facts." The information DeuxMoi shared came from an unnamed source who claimed McElhenney and Olson had "quietly separated" because McElhenney cheated on Olson in Wales, where he co-owns the Wrexham AFC soccer club with Ryan Reynolds.
Though false, the rumor started to spread widely online. Olson and McElhenney decided to have fun with it.
"Something tells me they are not fin-ished… moar to this story I’m shore," @WrexhamUSA responded, running with the sea creature theme.
McElhenney and Olson have been married for 15 years. They started dating in 2006 during the second season of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia."
McElhenney has said that he thought Olson was out of his league, but the main reason he avoided a romance initially was his feeling that he might be exploiting a power dynamic as one of the show's creators and writers.
Olson, who plays Sweet Dee in the series, pushed to have her character be as ridiculous and vulgar as the rest of the Gang instead of acting as the show's "voice of reason." That assertiveness translated into her courtship of McElhenney.
"She pursued me like a jungle cat," McElhenney said on an episode of "The Always Sunny Podcast" in February.
During a previous appearance on the Armchair Expert podcast with Dax Shepard, Olson said she and McElhenney kept their relationship secret for two seasons of the show.
"Once I fell in love with him, I realized that I was deeply in love with him in a way that I hadn’t been in love with anyone before," Olson said. "And then we started secretly dating, and he really just wanted to be casual, but I had this hubristic confidence that this person is completely in love with me — and he has no idea. It wasn’t even a game. It was just like, oh, you don't know, you have no idea that you are completely in love with me. You want to have it casual and just date, and yet you’re calling me every Friday night and you’re spending the night on Saturday night and you’re seeing me on Monday morning."
Now that we know Olson is an animorph — human, bird and jungle cat with an attraction to whales — maybe we can attribute her shifting states to why she's always getting injured.