NEED TO KNOW
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Sophia Bush is reiterating how her relationship with Ashlyn Harris began
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The actress shared in a Call Her Daddy interview that there was no relationship overlap and that she’s “never gonna change anybody’s mind who made it up”
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Bush forthcoming memoir, And I Will Tell You Mine: Notes from a Life in Progress, arrives on Oct. 27
Sophia Bush is shutting down speculation about the beginnings of her relationship with Ashlyn Harris, on her own terms.
The One Tree Hill alum, 44, appeared on Call Her Daddy to promote her memoir, And I Will Tell You Mine: Notes from a Life in Progress, in an episode that dropped on Wednesday, Oct. 21. During the discussion, she confirmed to host Alex Cooper that there was no overlap between her relationship with Harris, 41, and their past marriages.
The couple started dating in October 2023 following their respective divorce filings and later wed in the summer of 2025. Bush was previously married to entrepreneur Grant Hughes from June 2022 to August 2023, which is when they announced their separation. Harris was married to fellow soccer player Ali Krieger from December 2019 to September 2023, when she filed for divorce. “Can you clarify for everyone, when everyone thinks there was overlap,” Cooper, 32, asked her guest.
“Two people who had filed for divorce and lived in separate residences from their exes went to dinner,” Bush said, before reiterating that they both had already filed for divorce and there was no overlap in the relationships.
“Everyone wishes they could’ve done a million things differently at the time,” Bush added. “Like, do I wish that instead of flying home and stopping in New York — because I already had tickets to a comedy show — and taking her on a date, [I’d have] taken her on a date six weeks later? Yeah, of course I do. But I can’t change it.”
Bush added that she also “can’t change my reality for anyone else.”
“And I also can’t be my own personal definition of insanity, which is try the same thing over and over again with no result,” she said. “I’m never gonna change anybody’s mind who made it up. As much as there’s a part of me who was raised by my mother, who was raised for many years in the Bronx, that’s like, ‘Michelle Obama can go high, you wanna go low? Meet me in the gutter.’ Like, there’s also part of me that goes, I’ve done too much work on myself to hurt someone when I’ve been hurt. And I think, especially when there’s children involved, especially when the things that run away because they’re fun for strangers. And that’s true for all of us. They’re fun for strangers. When they affect people’s jobs, when they destroy someone’s ability to provide for their family, when they destroy someone’s credibility, unfairly. Like, I don’t want to be party to that.”
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Bush also spoke about handling negativity as a couple, adding that “strike season was really helpful” because “everything was quiet.” Elsewhere during her Call Her Daddy discussion, she recalled meeting Harris on Instagram in 2015, before meeting in person in 2019 at an event. Years later, she started recognizing her romantic feelings toward her, and Cooper asked Bush if she eventually told Harris. “Yeah, but I’m a little chickens—, but this whole, ‘Must have gotten drunk and had an affair,’ I was like, anyone who thinks that was a casual leap for me, doesn’t know me. No,” Bush said, adding that she was actually “nervous to say something.”
The moment itself, Bush added, came before a family trip with her mom and she joked she’d “never been less cool” than when asking out Harris for the first time. “She literally was like, ‘Are you asking me on a date?’ and I was like, ‘Yes.’ It was terrifying.”
In an April 2024 essay for Glamour, Bush previously shared her feelings on the public’s response to her personal life, writing that “people looking in from the outside weren’t privy to just how much time it took, how many painful conversations were had. A lot of effort was made to be graceful with other people’s processing, their time and obligations, and their feelings.”
She added, “The idea that I left my marriage based on some hysterical rendezvous—that, to be crystal-clear, never happened— … Rather than realizing I had to be the most vulnerable I’ve ever been, on a public stage, despite being terrified to my core? It feels brutal.”
The couple — who both serve on the board of the Human Rights Campaign and have been active supporters of LGBTQ+ causes — later wed in an intimate ceremony in upstate New York last year, with Bush sharing in an interview with Vogue that it “feels so amazing” to call Harris her wife.
And I Will Tell You Mine: Notes from a Life in Progress releases on Oct. 27 and is available now for preorder wherever books are sold.
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