15 Couples We Definitely Never Saw Coming

Matthew Lawrence has not acted in a high-profile production in quite some time, but he had maintained a presence in the tabloids in recent years due to his relationship with "Dancing with the Stars" dancer Cheryl Burke. Lawrence and Burke married in 2019, after reconnecting in 2017, a decade after their first try at dating. Burke filed for divorce in early 2022 and has alluded to Lawrence cheating on her (but has not explicitly said so). Regardless of what happened, we expected Lawrence to fade back into the background without Burke's star power. But then, he entered into a relationship we never saw coming. Seriously, who would have predicted that the middle Lawrence brother from "Boy Meets World" would land the "sexy" in "CrazySexyCool?"

Rozonda Thomas, better known as Chilli from the iconic girl group TLC, and Lawrence were first seen out together in Hawaii in August 2022. Her rep said they were just friends, but by November of that year, they were confirmed to be dating. Soon enough, they were posing on Instagram in matching onesies and being photographed around Los Angeles being all lovey-dovey. In March 2023, Lawrence told "Entertainment Tonight" that he wanted to have kids together, but Chilli quickly clarified that they are not currently trying for a baby. She has alluded to the door being open to that after marriage, however somebody may want to tell her that she's in her 50s. We know she looks a decade younger, but Thomas's baby-making years are quickly dwindling.

In no world would we have ever predicted that Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton would become one of Hollywood's hottest married couples. For one thing, they were both married when they met as judges on "The Voice" in 2014. By the next year, they were both divorced and leaning on each other for support. Still, we did not see things moving beyond friendship because of how different the two are, at least in terms of their public persona. Shelton is a country singer who loves his ranch, his alcohol (his red cup of vodka was a running joke on "The Voice"), and his low-key lifestyle. Stefani is flashy and fun, known for sparkles and sequins and for being the ultimate Orange County girl. On paper, it definitely does not make sense.

But it seems to work for the pair, who started officially dating in November 2015 and married in July 2021. The years have proven that opposites not only attract, but they also sometimes even rub off on each other. Shelton has become a doting stepdad to Stefani's three sons — which he told "Today" helped him see he was "more than just a country singer" — and Stefani has embraced a quieter life on the ranch, where she has fallen in love with gardening. Heck, Stefani has even started recording country music with her now-hubby — a far cry from the ska-pop she is known for. We can't help but root for them...as long as Stefani doesn't quit music and move to Oklahoma permanently.

Pete Davidson's romances do not surprise us, at least not anymore. Whether you are onboard the Davidson train or not, it has become very clear that something about the comedian attracts a wide array of women. He has been linked to everyone from Kaia Gerber to Kate Beckinsale to Phoebe Dynevor, so we no longer make any predictions about Davidson's dating life, aside from the fact that it will keep us on our toes. But Kim Kardashian has always been rather predictable in her choices of men. She favors athletes and musicians and has not really had high-profile romances with anyone outside of those categories. Kardashian has also demonstrated a liking for a certain physical type — muscles, dark skin, classically handsome — and Davidson is very much not that.

Perhaps that is why the entire Internet was shocked when Davidson became Kardashian's first post-Kanye relationship. The age difference and very different life stages also led to the surprise, since Kardashian has four children and Davidson is not yet 30 and definitely does not seem like he is ready to step in as a dad figure. The pair met when Kardashian hosted "Saturday Night Live," and even kissed during one of the episode's most talked about skits. "When we kissed, I was just like, 'Hmm!' It was a stage kiss, but it was still like, a little zing," Kardashian said on the podcast "Not Skinny But Not Fat". The couple dated for nine months before parting ways in August 2022.

On their own, rapper Flava Flav and actor/model Brigitte Nielsen are both lovably odd but put them together and the strangeness is almost overwhelming. We know this to be fact because the pair documented their short-lived, eccentric love affair on the VH1 reality show "Strange Love." The 2005 series lasted only eleven episodes, which is not that much shorter than Flav and Nielsen lasted as a couple. We are glad that somewhere out there, a reality television producer decided their antics needed to be documented for posterity, but we don't recommend "Strange Love" if you are looking for any sort of coherent storyline. Then again, Flav and Nielsen have both demonstrated a flair for reality TV — in fact, that is where they first met.

The couple began their romance after meeting on "The Surreal Life," another VH1 show from that era. Nielsen was famously once married to Sylvester Stallone, but admitted in a 2018 People interview that she's dated "some strange men." Enter Flav, who Nielsen was with for a year until she decided to be with Mattia Dessi instead. Nielsen and Dessi unofficially married pretty much directly following her split from Flav, and they made things legal a year later in 2006. When Nielsen announced she was pregnant in 2018 — at age 54 — Flav had nothing but love to send her way. "All I want to see is her happy and everything she wants in life," he told People. "She's good to people. That's why we clicked."

A lot of these odd couples are being judged on our interpretation of their weirdness, but not so with HGTV star Jonathan Scott and actor Zooey Deschanel. When these two started a romance, the public reaction was hilarious, with the consensus being that the pairing was totally out of left field. The reaction was so vibrant that even Scott has commented upon it. "I don't think it was expected," he told People in January 2020. "You know, what's really funny to me is, yeah, you see online and on social media, the internet is obsessed and keeps posting [about us], but the funniest thing is everyone's like, 'She's dating who?!'" Something about the pairing clearly works because the couple is still going strong years later.

Both Scott and Deschanel are divorced, which might explain why they have yet to tie the knot after four years together. They met in 2019 while filming a segment for an episode of "Carpool Karaoke," and moved in together in 2021. Though they are unmarried, Deschanel has referred to Scott as "an amazing stepdad" to her son and daughter with ex-husband Jacob Pechenik (via People). Even though we did not originally see straight-laced Scott and quirky Deschanel as an ideal fit, we can't help but be on board with the relationship because of how sweetly they speak about each other. "I don't want too seem sappy or hyperbolic but the simple truth is: I'm the luckiest girl in the world," Deschanel said in a 2021 Instagram birthday post.

Like Emilia Clarke and Seth MacFarlane or Zac Efron and Michelle Rodriguez, Elisabeth Moss and Fred Armisen are another example of a couple with a big age gap and very different public personas. File them in the same pile as Amber Tamblyn and David Cross in that they are unexpected matches but not off-putting or stomach-turning. But unlike Tamblyn and Cross, who remain married, Moss and Armisen did not go the distance and Moss has not had the best things to say about her ex-husband. "Looking back, I feel like I was really young, and at the time I didn't think that I was that young," Moss said in a 2014 Vulture interview. "It was extremely traumatic and awful and horrible. At the same time, it turned out for the best."

Like we said, goofy funnyman Armisen always seemed like an odd choice for Moss, who is funny enough in interviews but best known for her extremely dramatic roles in fare like "Mad Men" and "The Handmaid's Tale." The pair met on the set of "Saturday Night Live," when Moss was a guest in a sketch on an episode hosted by her "Mad Men" co-star Jon Hamm and Armisen was an "SNL" cast member. They were together only three months before getting engaged (always a good call, right?) and married in October 2009, a year after they first met. They split the following September, which makes their marriage one of the briefer ones in Hollywood history but is certainly not the shortest of all time.

Katherine McPhee and David Foster first met when she was a contestant on "American Idol" and he was a guest mentor, all the way back in 2006. Foster played piano when McPhee married her first husband Nick Cokas in 2008 (strange in itself) and the two were not linked again for almost a decade. They made their public debut in 2016 and, even though both of them had divorced their partners by then, played it coy for a while before confirming their relationship. They were engaged in July 2018 and married the following June, when McPhee was 35 and Foster was 69. "I totally get the judgment initially, but things are never as they appear, things are never exactly as they appear and I'm in love with our love story and that's all that matters," McPhee said on "Dr. Berlin's Informed Pregnancy Podcast".

We have established that age differences are not, on their own, always odd, but this one certainly is peculiar, if only because Foster has children older than his current wife. That said, McPhee appears to have a great relationship with Foster's grown children, though two of his more public daughters, Erin and Sara Foster, have not shied away from poking fun at her. "You ever side-planked with your 37-year-old stepmom?" joked Erin Foster, who is two years older than McPhee, on an April 2021 Instagram story (via Us Weekly). In February 2021, McPhee gave birth to son Rennie, and later that year, the couple competed on "The Masked Singer" as the banana split.

We can't say that Shailene Woodley and Aaron Rodgers are one of the oddest matches on this list, but their relationship always felt a bit puzzling. Woodley is a super earthy actor who makes her own deodorant and pens op-eds for Time advocating for environmental causes. Rogers, on the other hand, is a professional athlete who seems more fit for a car show than the forest. "They disagreed on a lot of things. Early on, they decided to agree to disagree about things and not debate them," an anonymous source told People in 2022. While disagreeing about fundamental political and social issues is not necessarily a recipe for disaster, simply avoiding certain topics is not a sustainable strategy.

Rodgers and Woodley were first linked very soon after the NFLer split from race car driver Danica Patrick, his partner of two years, causing some gossip sites to speculate about possible cheating. That was in July 2020, but the couple was not confirmed to be dating until February 2021. Only days after an anonymous insider confirmed the relationship, Rodgers himself announced their engagement at the NFL Honors Awards. They split up a year later, and Woodley has since expressed her discomfort with the public attention, especially on Instagram. "It was the first time that I'd had a quote-unquote 'famous' relationship, and I watched [the] scrutiny, opinions, the desire for people to know my life and his life and our life – it just felt violating in a way that, before, it was fun," she told Net-a-Porter.