Leighton Meester Gives Rare Insight Into Her Family Life With Adam Brody

Leighton Meester is protective of her private life, a trait she shares with husband Adam Brody. The "Gossip Girl" and "The O.C." stars made our teenage dreams come true in early 2013 when Meester and Brody were first romantically linked, the New York Daily News reported. As protagonists on two popular TV shows produced by Josh Schwartz, they'd met years before they started dating, but they didn't get to know each other properly until 2010, when Meester and Brody were tapped to co-star in the 2011 rom-com "The Oranges," Brody explained on Anna Faris' "Unqualified" podcast in March 2021, according to Us Weekly.  

As he was in a relationship at the time, Brody and Meester's romance didn't kick off until a year after the film came out, he detailed. And that's right about when their preference for keeping their lives out of the limelight must have developed because they were super secretive from the get-go. Just because we didn't know about it doesn't mean their relationship wasn't evolving at the speed of light, though. 

Only months in, Meester and Brody became engaged, according to the Daily News. Did this mean they were ready to be more open about it? Their secret wedding in February 2014 suggested otherwise. As Us Weekly reported, neither actor had commented publicly about their relationship up to that point. They've become more lenient with time, talking about each other without exposing too much. Meester, however, just gave rare insight into their family dynamics and motherhood.

Leighton Meester and Adam Brody became even more protective over their shared life after they became parents to their daughter, born in August 2015, and son, born in September 2020. In fact, a year and a half after his birth, the couple still hasn't announced their baby boy's name. But Meester opened up about how she feels about being a working mom in a March 4 conversation with Entertainment Tonight. "Working is the ultimate guilt," she admitted.

Meester loves to work and equally loves being a mother, but reconciling the two has been a struggle. "This world, our society, everything, it doesn't really give us a lot of space for feeling whole on either end, and feeling good about going to work, or leaving our kids, or being with them. We can't do that either," she added. Meester also doesn't think the guilt subsides with time. "It doesn't seem like it gets better," she said. "I've been thinking maybe it would, but it doesn't."

Meester was separated from her daughter and Brody for a month when she jetted off to Croatia to shoot Netflix's "The Weekend Away" — and it hit her like a bag of bricks. "It wasn't OK. It was not cool." In this sense, having a baby in the pandemic was a blessing. "To be more or less quarantined during [this] time ... has its benefits. You've gotten to be in a cocoon," Brody told People in October 2020.