Sophia Bush and Ashlyn Harris Are Married! The Romantic Story Behind Their Special Day

Actor and debut author Sophia Bush’s new memoir, And I Will Tell You Mine: Notes from a Life in Progress, includes plenty of revelations—but perhaps the most exciting among them? The news that she and her partner of three years, former professional soccer player Ashlyn Harris, are now wife and wife.

Bush and Harris tied the knot in a private ceremony in upstate New York in the summer of 2025, with Harris’s children, Sloane and Ocean (to whom Bush is a proud stepmother), in attendance.

The event’s intimate scale suited the happy couple perfectly. “When you get to this stage in your life, you begin to unpack what’s yours and what’s always sort of been for everyone else,” Bush tells Vogue via Zoom, with Harris seated by her side. She adds, addressing her wife: “You’ve been playing in stadiums in front of 60,000 people since you were 15 or 16, and I started playing a character for tens of millions of people when I was 21. It’s such a privilege to be able to perform as an athlete or an actor, but it also comes with certain costs.”

“The kids were just running and happy, and we picked flowers from the property and our daughter Sloane was holding them. It was so fun for them, because it wasn’t this pressure-filled day that’s too much for young kids,” says Harris, with Bush going on to recall roasting marshmallows as a family on their wedding night. “It was so precious, and zero pressure. I will never forget it, and I think wedding days sometimes aren’t like that,” she says.

The couple made up for their tiny guest list by visiting friends and family across the country afterward to break the news of their nuptials in person. “We got to have personal experiences with everyone we love, and once we got through all of those, how do we put it out? Because I don’t want to keep sitting on panels or in interviews and being like, ‘My partner,’” Bush says, before turning to Harris again. “You’re not my partner, you know? You’re my wife. And it feels so amazing to say that.”

Of coming out publicly—first as a couple, in Bush’s 2024 Glamour cover story, and now as newlyweds—Harris reflects: “This conversation is not about Sophia and I. We know the love we share. We understand how sacred and how pure our love is. But the visibility piece matters, because there are still kids hiding who don’t feel seen, and if we make room and space for one person, that’s worth maybe costing us a little bit of peace in the public eye.” Harris and Bush have long been active in LGBTQ+ advocacy spaces, and both sit on the board of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC).

Below, read an exclusive excerpt from And I Will Tell You Mine: Notes from a Life in Progress in which Bush describes the extraordinarily ordinary and beautiful day when she and Harris said “I do.”

We chose each other quietly. After so many years of having so much of my life dissected and turned into headlines for people who don’t know me, there was something sacred about letting this belong to us first. Maybe that was why I found myself thinking so often about the stories that had shaped us long before we ever found each other. The stories we inherited. The ones we carried. The ones we hoped—if we were lucky—to live our way into.

Ash spoke to me about the gorgeous legacy of her grandparents, a love story that was her lighthouse. Knowing it was there had gotten her through a tough childhood; she’d spent her life trying to get back to a shore that felt like home. They’d met at fifteen and were together for more than sixty years. She showed me pictures of them, young and beautiful on the beach in sepia-toned film. Her grandmother was always in red lipstick and red nail polish, her grandfather the kind of man who would drive her to every appointment and wait in the car reading the paper until she was done, just so he could be the one to drive her back home. When he died, her grandmother sat her down and told her plainly she knew she’d be gone soon too…because the other half of her was gone.

It was impossible for my heart not to be changed by hers. Ash had spent so long training herself to be exceptional. At any cost. And then I got to watch her learn she was already enough. That she didn’t have to earn love. That she could carry it, the best and the worst and plenty of horribly unfair things, and make something wonderful from it all. It was breathtaking to witness.

That was what I wanted my life to look like. This is who I wanted to spend it with.

And she wanted to spend it with me.

As that beautiful realization settled in, a friend asked how I could still believe in marriage knowing what I knew about how it could end. It surprised me how quickly and clearly I knew the answer. That if in ten years she and I grew into different people and didn’t want to be together, I would rather get divorced all over again—and do it with the love and tenderness I’d always thought was the goal in the first place—than miss my chance at being married to her at all. I felt it in my bones.

After asking each other what seemed like a thousand times, we called city hall and walked in a few days later. We pulled into the parking lot, positively giddy. When we got out of the car, I took her picture standing in front of the blue door.

Then I called my best friend Nia. We were taking all the kids upstate the following weekend, and tacking on a wedding to the state fair felt perfectly wholesome.

“Hey,” I began. “I’m sending you a link, and I’m going to need you to click it immediately.”

“Are we getting married this weekend?!” I could hear her smile through the phone.

“We are,” I said.

“I’m in.” On the other end of the line, I heard her pause. I knew she was already reading the web page to get herself ordained.

“Yay!” I said. “Apparently, it only takes five minutes.”

“Okay, I’ll call you right back. Love you both so much!” she said.

I took Ash’s hand, and we grinned.

What felt like just a few seconds later, my phone chimed. “Two minutes and thirty-six seconds,” Nia wrote.

I laughed, replying, “Always my overachiever. Love you so.”

I’d organized clothes for all the kids, my godson included, but realized, as I unpacked my bag, that I hadn’t grabbed an outfit for myself. There was no shortage of workwear at the farm, but Ash had packed a tuxedo, and so wearing a Carhartt bib didn’t feel appropriate. I went down to the basement to rip through some boxes—one of many I still haven’t unpacked because I’d been living more and decorating less (I’ll get around to it, eventually)—and I found it. A dress I’d worn years ago to a party—funnily enough, with Nia when she was pregnant. It was black velvet with gold flecks shimmering through it. I’d loved it then because the pattern reminded me of space, and now it reminded me of the starry sky we’d all looked up at over the fire pit the night before. It felt just right. Nia would be standing next to me as I wore this dress again, all our kids running around us, as I married my person, who just happened to have grown up a few miles down the beach from Kennedy Space Center.

We tucked our handwritten vows into a Mary Oliver book. On the page we picked, a poem starts with her saying, “I did think, let’s go about this slowly,” and ends with “but, bless us, we didn’t.” I didn’t want to wait one more minute to call her mine.

Then, Nia handed us the book, and the rest of my life began.

We wept. We laughed. We exchanged rings. The invisible string pulled tighter around us.

When our photos came, they were perfect. Just us. Pure joy. The backyard and the sunset. Easy, and by that, I mean at ease. And it was ours, just ours.

Mary Oliver’s “Instructions for Living a Life” are as follows: “Pay attention, Be astonished, Tell about it.” For a long time I thought telling meant explaining. Making a case for your ­reality. Providing enough context that everyone would understand. Now, I think it means something else entirely. I think the kind of telling she encouraged is the sort that only happens after you’ve lived something long enough to know what it means to you. Means for you.

Telling matters. It is also okay for the telling to take time. It is okay to move as slowly as you need. Giving yourself the space to figure out how you feel about something, to journey through your own life and learn, in the time, you are meant to? I don’t think there’s any other way.

I am telling you now to give it as a gift of sorts, and I am a recipient of that gift too.

Because Mary was right. Telling it has been important for me. It’s been freeing and gorgeous and absolutely hideous too. This is not for the faint of heart. I’ve come to learn my heart is so much more tender and sensitive than I was able to admit for ages, so much tougher and capable of seemingly impossible feats of strength too.

The second of Mary’s three instructions? “Be astonished.” I am. I am astonished by the beauty I have come to find and hold to my heart in this lifetime. I will search for it in every single one. Because what I know now is it’s written in the stars. And the sun too.

There is a photograph from that magical day—the two of us at the edge of the woods, the sun bursting through the tree leaves just so. And there we are, standing in the bucolic countryside in each other’s arms with a full halo of gold and green light wrapped around us in a perfect circle like a wedding ring. It was so beautiful. Nature had wrapped us in its magic hour. It felt like a sign, if you believe in that sort of thing. I do.

After all the years of searching and striving and performing, I look at that photograph on our wall every day. When I do, I hear the same tender voice murmur from deep inside my chest…You are in the right place. And for the first time, I believe it. Not because of a home. Not even, first, because of a person. But because I finally found my way home to myself. And now I get to love us both, she and I. How lucky I am.

This is the first chapter of my life that feels truly, wholly, divinely mine.

Adapted from the book And I Will Tell You Mine: Notes from a Life in Progress by Sophia Bush. Published by Flatiron Books, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers, on October 27, 2026.

Via: Vogue