I Can't Stop Thinking About Chrishell Dating Mr. Schuester

Yes. This really happened. And I, for one, am obsessed.

I have to get this off my chest. Selling Sunset star Chrishell Stause and Matthew Morrison, the actor that played Will Schuester on Glee, were engaged from December 9, 2006 until an undisclosed date in 2007. Take a moment and really let that sink in. If that sentence means absolutely nothing to you then, congrats, you probably have an advanced degree in astrophysics and are doing something productive to help society. But for all of the rest of us, that sentence is almost not to be believed.

This wasn’t exactly privileged information. Chrishell even mentioned it on an episode of Selling Sunset during the first season. In confessional she said “‘If I ended up with the person I was with when I was twenty-five, I would want to kill myself…Yeah, you can google that. You were a dick! Sorry!’ At the time, You may have missed this moment and forgot to google it because, if you’re anything like me, you immediately go into smooth brain mode whenever you turn on Selling Sunset. It’s kind of like that movie Limitless but for turning your brain off and that’s why it’s perfect but any way I digress.

It’s not the fact that the Selling Sunset star and Glee’s show choir instructor used to bang on the regular that’s so hard for me to swallow. Absolutely insane combinations of people have sex every god damn day. No, it’s not that. What gave me pause when I unwittingly stumbled upon this information during a Wikipedia rabbit hole was that they were engaged to be wed. Forgive my trad-wife sensibility here, but this means that the Oppenheim Group’s star agent and Glee’s cringe-y choir leader were truly in love. Or, at the very least they thought they were, and honestly what’s the difference?

I know what you’re thinking. It is very normal, perhaps even common or expected for two celebrities to date. In fact, It’s kind of what they were put on earth to do. And as far as Chrishell and Matthew Morrison go they are both kind of shameless, pretty random sauce: maybe it was a perfect match. Plus, it was nearly 20 years ago! Who cares?

Me. I care. I cant explain it but sometimes two people are in a committed relationship and it makes you question the very existence of love. You look at them and you’re like, love can’t actually be real if these two people think that they’re in it. You can’t wrap your head around the fact that these two individuals seemingly went on dates and hit it off and then decided to fuck and cuddle and cohabitate and make each other soup when they’re sick and fold each other’s laundry and meet each others family and then after all that, eventually decided to spend a lifetime together. How on earth did these two people land on each other despite all life’s many obstacles—the improbability, the randomness, the complete capriciousness of human nature? It’s hard not to think about certain couples and think, well, if that’s love, it must not be for me.

If you couldn’t already tell, Chrishell and Matthew fucking Morrison are one of those couples for me. Other couples that fall into this category include but not limited to: Kaylor and Aaron on the most recent season of Love Island: USA; One of my best friends but I won’t say who; Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster! Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and also Katie Holmes (but we’ve all heard the rumors about that one)

For every couple like that there are of course a million relationships that make all the sense in the world: J Lo and Ben Affleck! Macaulay Culkin and Brenda Song! Barry Jenkins and Lulu Wang! Serena and Cordell from Love Island USA! Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster (I know what I just said but I honestly don’t know where to place them)! My mom and dad! (Sorry, I am not a child of divorce! I can’t relate!)

Perhaps I’m being unfair (I usually am), but I can’t help how I feel. I swear It’s not even the fact that he’s a straight guy in musical theater so that means he’s secretly gay—(such a 2004 take by the way) or the fact that she actually is gay, and recently married her nonbinary Australian musician lover G- Flip. It’s not about the kinsey scale or sexuality identity—this is purely a vibes based assessment of compatibility. Chrishell and Mr. Shuester’s energies don’t match up. Their chakras aren’t aligned. They do not and did not belong together.

Of course, at some point they realized this and promptly called off their engagement. In her memoir—yes, Chrishell has a memoir called Under Construction: Because Living My Best Life Took a Little Work—she addressed their relationship. “I’m thankful for where I am, as painful as some of my breakups may have been. I dated Glee actor Matthew Morrison in my mid-twenties, and we fell in love and got engaged. I didn’t fully understand what a healthy, solid relationship looked like, even though of course I thought I did.”

And there we have it! A potential explanation. She was young—in her mid 20s—she even admits she didn’t know what a solid relationship looks like! But notice for all the caveats and explanations she still says this: “We fell in love and got engaged.” She doesn’t walk back the fact that at one point she fell in love with Matthew Morrison, the original Link Larkin in Hairspray, an aria singing Italian man in the musical Light in the Piazza , and Rachel Berry’s biggest champion on Glee.

Of course, the thing about love is that it’s not for other people to decide. It doesn’t matter that thinking about what Chrishell and Matthew Morrison talked about on dinner dates gives something akin to brain fog. If they were two consenting adults who felt they were in love then god damn’t they were in love!

I think I’ve always struggled with trying to make sense of things, overthinking things. Knowing how or why something happened, getting to the bottom of things. It’s good for writing but bad for relationships. Some connections defy logic. Some feelings are inexplicable. Some couples don’t make any damn sense. And I guess that’s kind of the beauty of the whole thing. There is no known quantity, no element on the periodic table, that can explain the fact that Chrishell Stause and Matthew Morrison were engaged from December 9, 2006 to an undisclosed date in 2007. And, insane as it may be, that does make me believe in the power of love.

This essay was performed at Sam Falb’s “Meeting of the Lovers” reading at the Susan Inglett Gallery on February 13, 2025.