## Adam Brody and the Life Constructed Deliberately
She met Adam Brody while filming The Oranges in 2010. The Oranges was a darkly comedic drama about suburban New Jersey relationships — a film in which both Meester and Brody appeared in supporting roles — and the meeting happened in the specific context of a working set rather than through the entertainment industry’s social circuits. They kept the relationship private for several years, which is its own specific act of management: declining to make a relationship into a public narrative before the relationship itself has settled into something stable.
They became engaged in November 2013. They married on February 15, 2014, in a private ceremony. The wedding was not a public spectacle; it was a private event that became known afterward rather than being documented in real time.
The symmetry of the match is something observers have noted: two actors who played specifically wealthy, specifically stylized television characters — Blair Waldorf for Meester, Seth Cohen on The O.C. for Brody — who found each other, maintained a private relationship, and married without extensive media coverage. Both of them had been more culturally visible during specific periods of their careers than they were in the years immediately around their marriage. Both of them had, to varying degrees, navigated the specific challenge of being a Person Who Played A Famous Character and trying to maintain an identity on the other side of that characterization.
Brody’s Seth Cohen, like Blair Waldorf, was a character defined by a specific kind of privilege — in his case the particular privilege of the alienated, culturally sophisticated rich kid in Newport Beach who finds meaning in music and comics while his peers find meaning in beach parties. The two characters occupy different registers of the same cultural moment: the mid-to-late 2000s wave of teen dramas set among the American elite, in which the wealth of the characters was presented simultaneously as their defining advantage and their defining complication.