Here's All the Need-to-Know Info About Jenny Slate's Near-Perfect Husband, Ben Shattuck
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When she's not making us laugh or warming our ice-cold hearts (often simultaneously—see: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On), Jenny Slate spends a lot of her time living a very normal life as a wife and mom in Massachusetts. If you're not already totally aware of the husband and baby factors in Jenny's life, that's totally fair because she tends to be very low-key about her personal life (but considering the level of privacy and aura of chill she managed to maintain about her love life when she was dating a certain star-spangled Avenger, that's well-established, right?).
So who has the honor of being Mr. Jenny Slate, you ask? His name is Ben Shattuck—and no, you're not alone if your New Tab+Google TF Out of This Person reflex just twitched. But you don't need to spend precious hours from your day scouring the internet for all the best Ben Shattuck intel, because we already did exactly that for you. So go ahead and scroll on down the page for everything you need to know about Jenny Slate's husband.
He's a writer/painter/curator (but not an actor).
Like Jenny, Ben is definitely a bona fide, capital-A Artist. Unlike Jenny, he's not an actor/comedian though. Ben is primarily a writer (his memoir, Six Walks, is one of those universally-beloved, critical darling books that you can gush about to impress people at fancy-schmancy parties), but he's also a painter and gallery curator. That last one is very literally the family business—Ben is the director and curator of his mom's gallery, the Dedee Shattuck Gallery (and his dad is also a painter, so art is 100 percent the "family business" in the Shattuck house).
Although he's not an actor, he is getting a taste of the entertainment industry (and is no doubt happy to have a pro like Jenny at home to tap for advice along the way) because his story The History of Sound is being adapted into a movie starring Josh O'Connor from The Crown and Paul Mescal from Normal People.
He's a Massachusetts native.
Another thing Jenny and Ben have in common are their Massachusetts roots. Ben was born and raised in the state (and, as such, spent tons of time growing up by the sea/gathering great material for settings for his future writing. FWIW, Jenny is from Milton, MA and the couple, unsurprisingly, have decided to settle in the state.
"I live in a small town in Massachusetts (Dartmouth) and I have very bad WiFi at my house. Really bad," Jenny explained during a Jimmy Kimmel Live! interview. "So I use the internet at my husband's general store. He and his brother bought the oldest general store in the United States."
But he's lived all over the damn world, really.
Even though, as we've established, art is very much the Shattuck Family Business and he probably could have just gone right into #ArtWorldLife after high school, Ben decided to go the completely opposite route and study all kinds of things at all kinds of impressive institutions in all kinds of places. After graduating from Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, he went on to attend the University of Iowa’s VERY prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. And, according to his official work bio, he also spent time living/studying painting with Odd Nerdrum in southern Norway, and teaching fiction writing at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and the University of Iowa. So yeah, he's done A LOT.
He's an over-the-top romantic.
To be fair, we're extrapolating this one based on the fact that his proposal was like something you'd watch in a romantic comedy, roll your eyes, and go, "Ugh, so unrealistic—no one does THAT MUCH romance, even for a proposal." But Ben did. Seriously: He flew Jenny to the South of France, found an abandoned castle, and then planned a picnic there.
“He took me to France and made a picnic and made me feel happy and free and then he asked me to marry him and i screamed YES. I love you @benshattuck_art, you are the kindest and brightest and I am so grateful and here we go and keep going,” Jenny wrote on Instagram at the time (per CNN).
Then Ben 'gram-bragged the day, as is his right after planning such an extra proposal:
"In an abandoned castle in southern France, I asked this woman to marry me. ??????Here she is in front of a door the color of her soul," he captioned the post. "In LA / MA / Holland / Belgium / France thank you @jennyslate and UP UP UP to more adventures ??????."
He's a Jenny Slate-certified feminist ally.
In a 2019 interview with Glamour, Jenny described Ben as a "a well-adjusted feminist man," which is high (and, let's be honest, rare) praise.
"There are a lot of dudes out there that think they're allies because they're just not as gross as they used to be," she explained. "That's not good enough. And moreover, they're sensitive about how gross they've been able to be in their privilege and patriarchy. I don't feel like anybody deserves an award for not being completely repulsive. I'm fortunate that my partner isn’t that way."
*And* a Jenny Slate-certified amazing partner.
Clearly, Jenny thinks highly of Ben as a partner since she, you know, married him (in a very intimate NYE ceremony in their living room after multiple attempts at planning a more traditional—and crowded—wedding were thwarted by the pandemic), but the way she gushes about him will make you realize all the qualities you've always been looking for in an SO but couldn't articulate.
"He has truly never let me down," she explained in that 2019 Glamour interview. "He's romantic and caring, and he treats me like the person that I know that I am. Because I hold him in such high regard, and he treats me like such a dear friend, I work on growing and changing in a way that doesn't involve shame. It's just like, ‘Wow, I'm so excited that I can be myself with this person. And I seek to continue to expand.'"
And, FWIW, while kids can notoriously add stress for couples and bring buried relationship issues to the surface, that was not the case for Ben and Jenny, who welcomed their daughter, Ida Lupine, in early 2021. Even though a pandemic pregnancy meant masking during labor, Jenny told Entertainment Tonight it was still "strangely rather romantic" because of how connected she and Ben were during the birth—and she said becoming parents only made them closer (which she didn't even seem to think was possible at that point).
"He was so sweet and supportive toward me," she added. "We are already very, very close, but I guess you can get closer and closer when your love is healthy and good.
So yeah, now the rest of us are basically just waiting on the Ben Shattuck Cloning Initiative to become a thing so we can get in on some of those Jenny Slate heart eyes vibes ourselves.
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