Good things come to those who wait. David Harbour found love with Lily Allen, but it took him a while to find The One.

“I’m easily swept away, but I’m trying not to be as much. I’m better at the fantasy of relationships than I am at the daily real life, but I”m trying to steer myself into a realist,” the Stranger Things actor told Women’s Health in October 2017, two years after he split from ex-girlfriend Julia Stiles.

He added, “What I find most exciting now is sharp, intelligent, insightful women. People who are deep thinking, who have sort of a weird way of looking at the universe are wildly attractive to me. So if I can find one of those gals who can stand me, then maybe I might have something thing.”

Harbour found “one of those gals” about two years later when he met the “Smile” singer on a dating app.

“I was in London alone, doing Black Widow, on this app, going on dates and stuff,” he shared with GQ UK in July 2022. “I started texting with her, she was in Italy at the time — we got together, went on a date at the Wolseley and it was, you know, she’s f–king unbelievable.”

The Dartmouth College alum had put on weight to play the Red Guardian in the Marvel movie, so he wasn’t feeling his most confident about his physical appearance.

“She claims to have fallen in love at first sight with me — I mean, who wouldn’t?” Harbour quipped. “I remember the exact moment. It was our third date. I was just in this phase, where I was like, I’m just going to be brutally honest about everything, because why lie? And I told her something about my life, about my beliefs … It would take a really extraordinary person to be accepting of the things that I said. And I remember thinking: Wow, that’s somebody I want to be around.”

He decided to make things official after one year of dating after an exchange with Allen’s kids. The England native shares daughters Ethel and Marnie with ex-husband Sam Cooper, from whom she split in 2016.

“We were riding around at the beginning of the [coronavirus] pandemic — she has two kids, these beautiful daughters, 8 and 9 — and we were riding bikes out in the country trying to figure out what we were gonna do for the next year or however long it was going to take,” Harbour recalled during a June 2021 appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!. “And the little one was riding along and she was going like, ‘David, Dad, David, Dad.’ Because the ‘d’ got her confused. And the older one got very upset with that, which I understand, and she was like, ‘He’s not our dad! He’s not our dad!’”

He continued: “And the younger one was like, ‘Well, what is he? He’s kind of our dad.’ She’s like, ‘No, he’s not.’ ‘He’s kind of our stepdad.’ ‘No, he’s not.’ And she goes, ‘What is he?’ And she goes, ‘He’s just some guy in our lives!’ … I was like, ‘I need to marry this woman.’”

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Harbour married Allen in an Elvis-officiated ceremony in Las Vegas in September 2020.

Scroll down to see the women Harbour has linked to throughout his career:

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