Dax Shepard Has Opened Up About His Marriage – And How He Recently Upset Kristen

In many ways Shepard and Bell are #couplegoals for a lot of people, not least because they’ve been together for over 12 years now. Both are young, attractive and talented, which obviously doesn’t hurt. And they have two adorable young daughters named Lincoln and Delta. So good things have clearly happened to them.

And Shepard himself is obsessed with cars – his daughter Lincoln is in fact named after one. So it was his dream come true when he was made co-presenter of the car show Top Gear America. It premiered back in 2020, and Shepard definitely hasn’t been quiet about how much fun he has making it.

Shepard appears to have his dream family, dream wife, dream job – but not everything always runs smoothly. Take the incident that happened on Top Gear America. In a February 2021 episode Shepard decided to have an image of him and Bell painted on the side of a van, but it wasn’t a very flattering depiction.

The van mural showed a muscle-bound Shepard holding a sword, while a loincloth-clad Bell clung to his leg. It was inspired by a Chuck Norris movie, but Shepard knew from the get-go that his wife would hate it. He told the website PopCulture that month, “My wife is pretty adamant that’s the one vehicle she doesn’t want in our driveway.”

Shepard went on, “She wasn’t thrilled with the level of ‘female empowerment’ that was depicted in that mural. Understandably. And my kind of excuse was we had to honor the era in which this was popular. It didn’t fly.” But what else hasn’t flown in recent months? Is there actually tension in the fan-favorite marriage?

Unfortunately 2020 was a bit of a rough year for Shepard and Bell. Just as with many other couples, the quarantine and lockdown took a toll on them. And back in April of that year the pair did an Instagram Live interview with Katie Couric, and were asked if they were “getting along pretty well.”

Shepard said, “We’re getting along good with the kids, and we’re getting along good with the adults we’re friends with, but this has been stressful for mama and dada.” That seemed like a clear insight, but then the pair switched to jokes, making it harder to tell what their mood really was.

The couple joked to Couric that their last fight, “Just ended like eight minutes ago. Perfect timing.” Bell told Couric, “This is as physically close as we’ve been in a couple days ‘cause we’ve just found each other revolting.” And Shepard quipped that when it came to his wife, “America’s sweetheart has some character defects.” But was there really anything the matter?

Several months after that interview, in September of 2020, Shepard made a revelation on his podcast Armchair Expert. And it turned out that he and his family had been through something serious, which he’d initially kept quiet about. After many years of sobriety, the actor had relapsed after being prescribed painkillers following an accident.

Yet thanks to Bell and the kids, Shepard was able to get himself out of the hole he’d fallen into. He said to them on the podcast, “I hated me at that point and so, to be able to tell you guys and feel unconditionally loved and that I would be accepted was really special … It saved my life.”

Shepard and Bell have shared so much about the difficult moments of their relationship, even things that may paint a bad image. Back in 2015, for instance, Shepard told Good Housekeeping magazine that when he first met Bell and her friends, he “was suspicious of their unbridled happiness. I thought, ‘Something stinks here; they’re in a cult.’”

And Bell was hardly instantly attracted to him either. In 2019 she told the Today show that when she’d met her future husband at a dinner party, she experienced “no sparks whatsoever.” Plus she had no idea that he was famous. And the only real impression he left on her was that he “talked so much.”

Eventually the pair met up again at a hockey game, and that time there was flirting. And they started falling in love, but it wasn’t a smooth ride. In October 2017 Bell did an interview with Harry Connick Jr., revealing that in the early days of their romance things got bad and she had to change her behavior.

Bell said, “We’d get in a fight, because we would fight a lot, and I’d, like, yell something then slam the bedroom door, then I’d slam the front door, then I’d get in my car and then I’d skid out the driveway and I would sit around the corner in my car and it felt so good.” But Shepard told her that behavior wasn’t acceptable.

Because while it may have felt good for Bell, it didn’t for Shepard. The actress said, “I realized how incredibly toxic it was only after he pointed it out. Three months into our relationship he was like, ‘You can’t leave anymore during fights. I’m not going to do that.’… He has a very high standard and a strong code of ethics.”

But there were some other problems. Shepard appeared unwilling to actually tie the knot once it was clear the couple were heading that way, and Bell didn’t want to marry until same-sex marriage was legal. Eventually, it was Shepard’s friend and co-star Jason Bateman who encouraged him to marry Bell.

Yet Shepard’s aforementioned battle with addiction was a problem back then as well – and a bigger one. In 2012 the actor told Playboy magazine, “Kristen’s a good girl. She grew up very Christian, went straight to college, did great in school and started work immediately. She’s charitable and philanthropic and rescues dogs. So when we met, our backgrounds were opposites.”

Shepard went on, “All the things I’d done were terrifying to her, and she had a hard time believing I would ever be able to stay married and monogamous and a father and all those things. For the first year and a half we were together, that was what we battled over almost weekly.”

Of course, as later interviews revealed, there were still battles after that. Because Shepard’s more recent relapse was a big one, especially since the children were in the picture. And it was worse for him that it happened just as everyone was celebrating his achievement of making it to 16 years of sobriety.

Shepard said on his 2020 Armchair Expert podcast, “I’m lying to other people and I know I have to quit. But my tolerance is going up so quickly that I’m now in a situation where I’m taking, you know, eight 30s a day [painkillers], and I know that’s an amount that’s going to result in a pretty bad withdrawal. And I start getting really scared, and I’m starting to feel really lonely. And I just have this enormous secret.”

Naturally Shepard was terrified about having to confess the truth to his family. But he knew he had to, and it all worked out for the best. On his podcast he said directly to them, “I can’t imagine having to admit that to other people and feeling as safe as I did that you guys wouldn’t hate me.”

Bell responded by telling him how important his honesty was. She said Shepard’s ability to, “be so able to be honest, even at your most shameful moments, is what saves you.” She went on, “Your courage and boldness to say, ‘I feel like I’m slipping’ or ‘I did slip and I need to be honest before it gets worse.’”

But being open – and how important that was in a marriage – emerged in a separate interview Shepard did about his sobriety. And for the first time it became clear why he and Bell hadn’t sugarcoated their problems compared to other celebrities. Yes, in January 2021 the actor appeared on the Today show’s Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist.

Shepard explained that his and Bell’s reasoning had always been, “We don’t want anyone to think we met and it’s been easy ‘cause if that’s someone’s expectation of a relationship and certainly a marriage, it’s a bad expectation to have. So it’s interesting. We don’t feel like we have an option.”

This attitude is a pretty unusual one to see in Hollywood circles. Many high-profile couples will deny there’s a problem and project an image of a close relationship when the reality is anything but. Obviously that’s not healthy in the least, which is why Shepard and Bell refuse to play the game.

And that applied to Shepard’s Armchair Expert confession about his relapse as well. He told Willie Geist, “That’s the only thing I’ve said on the podcast that I straight [up] did not want to say. I get so much self-esteem out of being someone who has encouraged other people to try sobriety. [So I thought] I’m gonna be exposed as a fraud [by admitting the relapse].”

But Shepard went on, “I have a good friend who said to me, you know, ‘If what you like is helping people, there’s almost nothing you can do that’d be more helpful than you telling everyone.’” And it seems the exact same thing applies to problems in his marriage. Bell appears to agree, too.

Because Bell and Shepard have even been open about having couples’ therapy. In 2015 they both discussed the issue with Good Housekeeping magazine. Shepard said, “I noticed an actor and her husband on [a recent cover of a celebrity tabloid] that said, ‘In Couples’ Therapy!’ The clear message is, ‘Oh, their marriage is ending.’ There’s such a negative connotation.”

Shepard went on, “In my previous relationship, we went to couples’ therapy at the end, and that’s often too late. You can’t go after nine years and start figuring out what patterns you’re in.” Bell agreed wholeheartedly, saying, “There may be something that really hurt your feelings that you’re scared to bring up. Go talk about it with a therapist who can mediate. You’ll walk out of the room feeling like you’re [on the same] team.”

And in January 2021 Bell revealed that the two of them had been doing couples’ therapy during lockdown as well. She told People magazine, “Everyone’s proclivities are kind of bubbling over because we’re all caged in with each other. Dax and I, when we started this pandemic, were at a point in our marriage where we definitely needed a little therapy brush-up.”

Bell explained, “Every couple of years, we’re like, ‘We’re being very antagonistic towards each other,’ and we don’t want that. We go back to therapy and figure out what I’m not doing that’s best for you and what you’re not doing that’s best for me, and how we can serve this team goal better. It’s been incredibly helpful.”

That same month, Shepard gave an interview to Jimmy Kimmel, and he talked about the couple’s marriage again. He’d recently found his dream motorhome, he said, one with bunk beds for their daughters plus showers, a kitchen, the works. It was everything he ever wanted, but Bell wasn’t a big fan.

Shepard joked, “I don’t think she realized how big it was gonna be… She, rightly so, wants a beautiful house. She had a fantasy of it and it’s done, and the first thing I did is I pulled that motorhome right up in front of it.” But despite Bell’s opinion, it didn’t seem to be a big deal. That appeared to be just how they operated in the marriage.

The actor appeared to be on the chat show circuit a lot during January, as he also stopped by on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. He brought up again how important it was that he could be a sobriety role model for others, saying, “I get so much esteem out of being someone who’s vocally sober, and I have people who write me on month one or on week two, and I love that.”

But he talked about Bell as well, and how the family was holding up. The kids were “fantastic,” he said, and he was grateful he’d gotten to see them so much during lockdown. He’d also taken up strength training during that period and Bell had given him a “Most Impressive Body in Los Feliz” medal. Naturally, he wore it during the interview.

Yet the recent rush of news about Shepard and Bell’s marriage has led some to turn their noses up at the couple. That’s the price of being open, unfortunately. Bell ended up schooling one of the trolls who complained that “every piece of news” talked about how the couple couldn’t “stand each other.”

Bell said in response to that, “We adore each other, we just try to always be honest about how marriage, or companionship in any form, is hard sometimes. You can’t always be in control, or right, and it’s important to us that we lead with the honesty of your ‘perfect match’ being a myth.”

For those who do like the Bell-Shepard relationship, there’s about to be a lot more of it on TV. In March 2021 it was announced that the pair would be hosting and competing on a new show called Family Game Night. And it was partly based on the game nights they had together while still dating.

The couple teased the show during a joint appearance on Ellen that month. Bell said, “When I play games and get very competitive, I go fully offline. And that’s fun. It’s interesting for the viewer, it’s interesting for my husband. As long as we leave this show still married, I think it’s going to be great.” We think that’s almost guaranteed to be the case.