Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard are finding their new normal
while isolating at home during the coronavirus outbreak.
Two days after the couple admitted to Katie Couric that they’d “been at each other’s throats, real bad” as of late, Bell opened up to Entertainment Tonight about how they have adjusted.
While they have “gotten on each other’s last nerve these last couple days,” The Good Place actress, 39, said she and her husband, 45, are “doing much better now because we’re laughing about it.”
“But when we were not laughing about it for the first couple of days, that’s the hard spot,” Bell added.
She went on to explain that while the spouses “love spending time” together, “what is different about this quarantine time is you have so much more time to think about the other persona and their actions and sort of replay what they said or attach a meaning to something that they did and that I could do without” — something she called “useless.”
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Since the Armchair Expert podcast co-host came home following his self-isolation after traveling — during which his family entertained him by dancing outside the window of the apartment where he was staying — Shepard and Bell were adhering to a “color-coded” schedule for Delta, 5, and Lincoln, 7. But that only worked in the beginning.
“By day five, I was making everybody miserable,” Bell admitted to ET. “The kids hated that I was trying to adhere to the schedule. So about a week ago, I woke them up and I said, ‘This is your most important mission ever. Get up.’ I brought them in the kitchen and I had them rip up the schedule. … I had them shred it and they felt so good. I said the learning lesson here is that if you make a plan and it’s not working, you pivot.”
And now, “We’re doing just art projects around the house. We have neon glow paint and we’ve been painting the rocks outside so they glow and just doing silly stuff,” added the Frozen 2 voice actress. “Just reconnecting with each other and I think that’s the most valuable lesson.”
On Monday, Bell told Couric, 63, during the couple’s Instagram Live chat that it “has been stressful” at home for them, with Shepard joking that the interview was “perfect timing,” as their bickering had “just ended like eight minutes ago.”
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Shepard and Bell have been together for nearly 13 years, tying the knot in October 2013. The pair have been open over the course of their relationship about their ups and downs, and the conscious effort they have put in to continually solidify their foundation, including attending therapy together.
“We definitely had to work really hard at being a couple because we’re both incredibly, painfully stubborn, and we’re pretty much opposites,” The Ranch star told PEOPLE in March of last year.
“All these movies from the ’80s taught us that it’s love at first sight, and it is supposed to be easy and [that] all you have to do is find that person,” Bell added. “It took me a while to realize, ‘Oh, that was such a lie,’ because things that you work really, really, really hard for always yield the best results.”
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