There’s something tense about celebrity couples. Publicly, it’s all perfectly symmetrical faces and twin sets of 50-some-odd glistening teeth, but there’s always a looming sense that the breakup is going to be loud and contentious and make your divorce look tame by comparison, even after you lost the van and the good TV. Sometimes they get into tabloid-touted fights. Sometimes they put poops in their beds.
But sometimes you get relatively quiet high-profile romances, like the one between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone. They dated, and broke up, and have had nothing but nice things to say about each other since. Neither (to the best of the public’s ability to ascertain) has put any poop in any beds, shared or otherwise. If they have, then they’ve had the good taste to keep it to themselves.
Stone and Garfield first met on the set of The Amazing Spider-Man, a film about the world’s most attractive high school outcast being bitten by bugs until he could punch giant lizards really hard. The movie started shooting in late-2010, and by the same time the next year, the pair had been spotted together, being all social and canoodling.
The next few years were charming, if relatively quiet, considering. Largely free of the public drama inherent in most movie star couplings, Stone and Garfield continued to say warm, supportive things about one another during interviews, talking each other up during the international press tour for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 without going into detail about the ins and outs of their relationship. In 2014, Garfield hosted Saturday Night Live, and Stone made special appearances during his monologue and a particularly tongue-heavy Spider-Man sketch.
By October 2015, sources had informed People that Garfield and Stone had called things off after taking a break earlier in the year to work on projects on opposite sides of the world. All told, their time together lasted roughly four years, which, in the pantheon of relationships between Spider-Man stars, is just about middling.