Sofia Vergara and Joe Manganiello may have had a whirlwind romance, but they’ve proved that
their love was built to last. It’ll soon be seven years since the couple first met,
and they still seem so madly in love! From their sweet proposal story to the hilarious moment
when Joe was caught checking out Sofia during their first meeting, today, we’ll have it all!
“He smelled me, and he couldn’t help himself,” Vergara quipped on Good Morning
America shortly after they started dating. “That’s all you need, if you want Joe.”
Indeed, Manganiello told People not long before they started dating,
“I’m big into smell. It’s funny I got cast as a werewolf. There’s something about the smell on
that part of a woman’s neck where it meets the jaw, ahhhh! It’s heaven.” Meant to be, right?
The pair’s love story began in 2014. Joe first noticed Sofia at the White House
Correspondents’ Dinner while the actor was still with her ex-fiancé Nick Loeb.
While he didn’t make a move and was respectful of her relationship status, Joe did admit — and
was caught — checking out Sofia at the Bloomberg & Vanity Fair Cocktail after-party that night.
“Yeah, I totally got busted,” he told E! News back in 2014.
A couple of weeks after their encounter, Sofia confirmed that she had split with Nick,
citing their multiple ongoing problems. Joe heard the news and didn’t waist any time.
In fact, he was traveling for work when he found out Vergara was single, so he got her number from
her co-star Jesse Tyler Ferguson and flew out to New Orleans to take her on their first date. June
15, 2014, is a date they celebrate every year. The two went out for the first time in secrecy,
and Sofia was a bit hesitant since she and her ex had just split. She tried
to convince both of them that it wouldn’t work out — with little success, obviously.
“Like, ‘You’re too young, you’re an actor, you’re this, you’re that,’ and she was just doing it
to hear herself say it. She was trying to talk herself out of going there.” Manganiello recalled.
Meanwhile, Joe was already down for the count. “I knew right away,” Joe assured
Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show in 2018, asked when he knew Vergara was a right one.
Understandably, Sofia was indeed being cautious. The actor even admitted that she initially
thought Joe was too good-looking to date. “Like, it’s too much work, and I’m older.
I’m 43 years old. I don’t want to deal with a guy that every girl is after, you know?
But then I gave him a chance. I realized he’s not like a typical handsome guy. He’s not
vain. He’s very serious, very straightforward, very easy,” she confessed to InStyle.
For all his very public attractiveness, Manganiello had been leading a pretty low-key
private life. Though, he had just made the cover of People’s Hottest Bachelors issue at the time.
During an appearance on Jimmy Fallon, Joe shared the hilarious story that came out of it.
He recalled that he was on his way to see Sofia in New Orleans, where she was filming a movie,
and bought a People magazine where he was on the cover of the Bachelor issue.
“‘I know you just got out of this long-term relationship and if you need to be single then
I understand. Like, I’m not gonna like it, but I’ll get over it. But before you answer,
I wanna show you something,’” he recalled telling Sofia.
He whipped out the People and said, “Numero uno.” So, Vergara
started flipping through the magazine and told him she was checking to see “who else is on the
list.” A shared sense of humor, check. Like they can be even more adorable,
Manganiello said that before he started dating Vergara, she was his celebrity crush,
a tidbit included in his Hottest Bachelor profile. “She was laughing at me,” he told Ryan Seacrest
later. “She thought that I was crazy for having said that out loud or said it in the magazine,
but you know, I guess it worked.” As the months went by, the two were
smitten with one another and even started to celebrate the holidays together. Sofia,
a mother to then 23-year-old son, brought Joe to her family’s Thanksgiving celebrations in 2014.
“Giving thanks for a beautiful year and my loved ones!! Happy
thanksgiving!!!!!” she captioned a family pic. Once the couple knew they were going somewhere,
they didn’t waste any time. They moved in together that November, and he proposed on Christmas Eve.
Joe had a whole proposal planned on the beach during a trip to Hawaii over the holidays.
But when paparazzi nearly spoiled the engagement, he switched up the plans last minute. The actor
proposed in the couple’s suite and in Spanish. “I proposed to her on one knee in Spanish with
the sun going down. It was awesome.” Aww, how romantic…
“My heart was melting, and I simply said, ‘But of course!’” Sofia added.
He continued, “Our friends really know who we are, and it’s not necessarily that person
that you see walking down the street or yelling at the paparazzi, ‘F-- off — I’m
trying to get engaged here!’” A year after moving in together,
the couple made it official by walking down the aisle. The gorgeous pair officially became husband
and wife on Nov. 22, 2015. Cue a full-on destination wedding weekend for family and
friends in Palm Beach, which included a rehearsal dinner the night before the I-do’s and passing
out “#Jofía” t-shirts for the wedding party. The philanthropic couple asked that guests
donate to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital and Children’s Hospital Pittsburgh
instead of sending gifts, which couldn’t help but add an extra special touch to the festivities.
It was back to real life upon their return from their honeymoon,
but the fun continued. In fact, it was a must. Speaking with Men’s Health, Joe revealed just
how important humor is in their marriage. “My life is great because I really like
my wife. I like talking to her. I like goofing around with her. We f**king laugh all day long,
every day,” he expressed. “My favorite thing in the world is making my wife
laugh so much she cries. It’s the best.” Sofia also echoed her hubby’s thoughts,
telling HOLA! USA that a big reason why their relationship works is their shared sense of humor.
“We even talk to each other all the time in this little voice that we made up,
like a couple of dorks. Whoever heard us, would say, ‘What’s their problem?’”
Another key to their marriage is enjoying each other through and through.
Opening up in an interview, the actor confessed that there’s nobody he’d rather spend time with.
“People say things like, ‘Marriage and relationships are work.’ But it’s not. Life
is hard. Having somebody to help you deal with it is the greatest thing that ever happened.”
“It is so easy in all the ways that you want it to be easy and challenging
in all the most fun ways possible,” he added. Joe never pictured himself dating a celebrity,
but after he married Sofia, they became an instant A-list couple. And they have managed to make the
attention work to their advantage, saying that all the pressure only brought them closer.
In 2018, they even made a movie together, the sports-meets-redemption drama Bottom of the 9th.
Joe gushed to ET about how “easy” it was to work with his partner.
“I cast my wife, so we get to act together for the first time.
She just had to sleep with the producer,” Joe joked. “We were both there at work,
which made things a lot easier. You actually didn’t want to leave. It was so much fun.”
For their first anniversary, he didn’t just give her a card — he wrote her a whole book. “It was
about how we met, as well as our courting, and was about 40 pages long,” he explained. “I love
my wife a lot.” A couple of years later, they were the old married couple in the Hulu commercials.
Joe and Sofia are extremely supportive of each other. Unlike her hubby,
Vergara doesn’t do sports, but she readily accepts his obsession with all things Steelers.
“He’s like a sick person,” she once quipped on The Tonight Show, and understands that his mood rises
and falls with his hometown team’s fortunes. Asked if she watched football with him, she
said that she tries to stay away “at those hard times.” And when they’re playing, and she’s out,
Sofia checks on Instagram or Twitter to see what happens, “so I’m prepared to arrive,
to what I’m arriving at, you know.” However, Vergara can hang at Comic-Con,
and she accompanied fan-favorite Manganiello there in 2018. They also shared the summer fun with
one of their favorite double-date-night couples, Ferguson and Justin Mikita, who were celebrating
their fifth wedding anniversary at the time. America’s Got Talent judge was also on hand to
shower her man with support when he was honored with the Spirit of Sobriety Award at the Brent
Shapiro Foundation for Drug Prevention’s 13th annual Summer Spectacular Event in September 2018.
“Sixteen years ago… I crashed and washed ashore on the banks of sobriety,” the introspective actor
told the audience at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. “When I was growing up, when I thought of an
alcoholic, I thought of some toothless old guy in a trench coat in a basement somewhere.
I just never thought that would apply to me. That type of stigma kept me from getting the
help that I needed when I knew I needed it.” And he appreciates to no end how much Vergara
has been there for him. The biggest adjustment for the couple in marriage? “Coming to grips
with the idea that someone who is not related to you could possibly love you that much.”
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