Newlywed Patton Oswalt appeared on Jimmy Kimmel on Wednesday to discuss his wildly successful new comedy special, Annihilation, and his recent nuptials to Meredith Salenger. It was just following the wedding that we heard the story about how the couple âmetâ on Facebook after Patton missed a dinner party at mutual friend Martha Plimptonâs house. On Kimmel, Patton further elaborated that, by the time theyâd met each other, he already felt deeply connected to her.
The actor, 48, gushed about his new bride, Meredith Salenger, during Wednesdayâs Jimmy Kimmel Live!, which marked his first appearance since tying the knot with his second wife. He even wore his wedding suit for the late-night program!
âI married Meredith Salenger this amazing actress and she and our wedding planner, it was like watching two people plan a bank heist,â Oswalt recalled of the planning process. âBeing the groom is the best. You are a prop that eats appetizers. Thatâs all you are. Youâre just there and they tell you where to go.â
â[Meredith and I] met online. We met through mutual friend Martha Plimpton and she threw a dinner party and she invited both of us but we never met â I couldnât go because of some travel,â Oswalt recalled of how he missed out on being introduced to his future wife.
âAnd Meredith messages me the next day and says âYou missed some amazing lasagna last night dude.â That was on Feb. 28. We started talking, we didnât meet face to face until May 20,â the father of one explained.
âIt was very Victorian-like, exchanging letters kind of romance. Every night we would write about life, politics, books, it was all this deep stuff you do after the date. By the time we met on our first date I was so head over heels,â he added.
Since I dislike the phone and have no people skills in person, the internet has greatly increased my social circle, especially when it comes to meeting fellow writers. I have friends currently that Iâve never met. Weâve been communicating online for a few years and I do feel very much like I really know them so I can see how Patton and Meredith developed feelings for each other without meeting face to face. I think itâs sweet. I know many of you think this is too soon. I understand why you do and am not trying to convince you otherwise, I just donât share that opinion. So, I found it really sweet when Patton said:
âIt just felt like worlds were connecting and everything was okay again. Weâre still floating on this other level that weâve been on since the day we met. Iâve only ever felt that level of joy once before in my life, and it was so profound and perfect it felt greedy to ever wish for it again. But I did, so now all I can do is show Meredith a level of gratitude and love thatâs greater than the joy sheâs brought me, and my daughter Alice. Because this is a new level of joy, and a new life, and Iâll always strive to deserve it.â
Iâm really happy he was given that second shot and I love that he is so grateful for it. But you guys know I love ghost-stuff, right? Well, Patton and Meredith as well as many of their friends suspect Patton’s late wife, Michelle, might have been the one to orchestrate the couple from beyond the grave. In the clip, Patton also mentions that he and Meredith had several Facebook friends in common which is how they became connected. It turns out, Meredith had even more friends in common with Michelle, one of them being Meredithâs very good friend since 7th grade whoâd known Michelle since college. So yeah, common interests and similar tastes in friends yadda yadda but it is much more fun to think Michelle played matchmaker from beyond.
I want to end on this, though. Remember that Martha Plimpton officiated at their wedding, right? Patton said someone at their wedding pointed out how surreal their wedding was because Natty Gan was getting married to Remy by a Goonie at the Jim Henson Studios. Put in that context, Iâm kind of bummed the wedding wasn’t themed.
Photo credit: Instagram and WENN Photos
Iâm honestly rolling my eyes now. I donât get the need to âproveâ this relationship. They overshare too as if they have to prove that this is good. I just donât get it.
And yes I still worry about Alice and the fact that thereâs some weirdness on social media that makes me pause.
+1
+2
What social media weirdness? I’m curious
Some of their social media posts have been cringey. Paired with some of the recent interviews…they just give me pause on behalf of alice.
Frankly there’s a difference between Patton being able to move on quickly and alice. And I wonder if the “okay” timetable really took into consideration Alice and the trauma the death of her mother caused.
These posts will come back to haunt them should they ever separate or divorce. There are so many people who do this, and it’s downright embarrassing and even mortifying for some, to have to take down every single cringe worthy lovey dovey post over numerous years. I learned this mistake by my late 20s and I haven’t done it again since, but at least the photos I posted were from short-term relationships. I may post one or two photos, but I do not create an album or post hundreds upon hundreds of cheesy couple photos. These days you just never know when or if a relationship will end. I have a friend on social media who literally took down five years worth of couple photos after her fiance dumped her right before the wedding. Same with other friends who ended up divorced. It’s harder to hide messy breakups when everyone sees your conscious uncoupling on social media.
I don’t suppose the people in Alice’s life worry about her, they probably don’t even love her, so good thing strangers on the internet care, that will help a ton and not be weird at all.
There’s something off about him.
So happy for them
As long as the kid is happy and thriving!
So happy for them. I donât see this as oversharing. If he was ignoring the subject there would be an issue too. The outrage train is exhausting now-a-days. Let people live. Everyone experiences death and loss differently. Are we supposed to have the âperfect widowerâ now?
Only thing I found offensive about this was his comments about being the groom. A bit gender and heteronormative.
Also not really true in my experience. My husband is super detail oriented and I am very not detail oriented so he was involved every step of the way. He actually was texting me about table arrangements the day of and I had to tell him to calm tf down and that everything would work itself out. And we weren’t really outliers in that among our married friends anyway. Could be a gen x – millennial generational difference.
He is just talking about his own experience. He is not calling on all grooms. My husband planned everything with me and I donât see a problem with a wife that takes the lead.
No, he generalized his experience as typical or the role. Read the quote from: “Being the groom is the best.” He said it was part of the role to not have to plan and be a prop.
Wouldn’t have been a problem at all if he was talking about his own experience only.
Actually, since he said “THE” groom and not “A” groom, he is absolutely describing his experience as THE groom at HIS wedding.
Way to be condescending though.
He is not judging anyone else. He has a right to discuss his life in his own words. I thought it was sweet because it obviously made him happy to be that type of groom. He is a heterosexual man so his statements about himself will reflect that.
My husband wasn’t overly involved, and I am glad he wasn’t. It isn’t his thing, and we decided he would plan our honeymoon. Our wedding was for our families and my stepchildren, and my older sisters and mother and grandmother and his mother took it over, and I didn’t care. We just wanted to be married.
It’s nice to see a story about these happy, loved up newlyweds. Cute couple!
I’m always glad when a couple seems happy, but I do think jumping in to another relationship so quickly makes him seem rather unstable. What’s the rush? Can he not be alone? He needs to work on himself instead of jumping into another marriage.
Michelle “orchestrated” it, my ass! That is just their way of trying not to look so bad for shacking up so soon after she died.
Nobody wanted Patton to be lonely forever but the way he rushed to marriage again is just wrong and yes, disrespectful to Michelle and to Alice, because he isn’t looking after her needs, its just his. Dating MS for 2 or 3 years to make sure they actually work and that he was really ready would have been the responsible thing to do.
And she needs to stop describing herself as “mom”. Michelle’s family must be so annoyed.
So…Iâve been widowed unexpectedly, which is why I think Iâm taking these remarks kind of personally. I can tell you that no one on the outside will ever understand how intensely you feel as if the ground has dropped out from underneath you, how the world is not even yours anymore, youâre frozen in time while everyone else moves on, but also how the world no longer feels safe and reliable and sort of benignly friendly. It suddenly feels chaotic and unsafe, itâs somethung Iâm still dealing with, eight years later.
What that also does is realign your priorities pretty hard. If you fall for someone, you fall hard and you donât want to wait for whatever Other People say is proper, because BELIEVE ME, they all have opinions on how long things are supposed to take and what youâre supposed to do. Who youâre supposed to fall in love with and when that should happen. All based not one bit on you and your needs but completely on what they think is âproperâ based on esoteric and very subjective standards.
You want to just have this person in your life for however long you can, because you know life is short.
Not saying this is his or her perfect relationship, who knows. But am saying that he has every right to do whatâs right for him and that maybe other people should hold the judgment, as they have no clue what he went through and continues to go through. Because it doesnât end when a new relationship starts up, you just move to a new phase of your grief.
So yeah. Just consider reassessing your judgment and standards and seeing where they come from, rather than begrudging this man, his daughter, and his wife their happiness.
@Jensies,
YES to all of this. So sorry you’ve experienced it first hand.
â¤ď¸â¤ď¸â¤ď¸â¤ď¸. So easy for people to judge behind a keyboard. Thank you for this statement.
No Jensies, i won’t reassess anything. His child should be his priority. He is putting his needs before hers. I didn’t say he shouldn’t date or be miserable at home. But he didn’t have to propose to a chick he met barely one month before either, especially when his child was just adjusting to the shock of her mom dying. Its stupidity. I hope for the kid’s sake it works out or she will lose another maternal figure.
Wonderful, eloquent, informative comment about your experience. Thank you for sharing that. Definitely opens my eyes about judging others when I have never been in their shoes. Thank you.
Thank you all for your support. Itâs lovely and I appreciate it.
@Jane will be close minded until something like this happens to her and she faces this kind of life-changing trauma and sadness. But until then, live your best life judging others for making choices that seem to make them truly happy just because they donât take your frankly Victorian views on mourning to heart, Jane!
@Jensies
Eloquent. Thank you for your perspective.
Yes to everything you said, and maybe Alice feels the same. Why should she suffer the unrelenting loneliness of being motherless if she doesn’t have to???? Hasn’t anyone else lost their mom as a kid and been left with just their dad???
I think this is lovely. They look very happy. Life is short, and if they’re sure, they’re sure.
+1
In response to the comments in effect saying, “He’s so selfish. What about Alice?!” To be fair, in all the photos I’ve seen, it looks like Alice absolutely adores Meredith. I realize you’re not going to post photos of the bad or awkward moments, but in the photos they do share, that little girl looks truly happy to have Meredith in her life. I don’t see why this can’t just be a good thing for all of them.
Agreed. By all accounts, Patton has gone to great lengths to keep Michelle’s memory very much a part of Alice’s life.
I totally believe that his wife could have orchestrated this from heaven. It actually happened to my mom. A local rec center for adults arranged a trip to Atlantic City and she went. One of the men she met on the trip (and who lived in her city) was in her dream the night before, except in the dream he was crying and she was comforting him. He was a recent widower; his best friend dragged him on the trip to get him out of the house. My mom and he flirted and wound up having a 3 year relationship.
Here’s the spooky part. My mother has some psychic ability, which she hates, and sometimes her departed loved ones visit her. One day, months into her relationship with this man, the lights flickered in her bathroom. The flickering lights is a signal for her that one of her departed loved ones is saying hello. She thought it was her mom, so she said “Mom?” But the light stayed off. Then she thought it was one of her brothers. After calling out each one of her dead brothers’ names, the light stayed off. My mom was stumped. Then, for some reason, she thought to call out the name of her boyfriend’s late wife. When she did, the light flickered back on! My mother was completely freaked out.
Regarding Alice, she can absolutely be bonding with her stepmother while still mourning her mother – the two are not mutually exclusive or necessarily sequential. I obviously donât know this family, but I am familiar with grief and it doesnât always follow a straight line. Alice will likely deal with the death of her mother on some level for the rest of her life – and if her new stepmother understands that, she can be part of that process.
If you watch his latest stand-up, his late wife is very much part of their lives still. He came across as so raw. I think she left such an immense void that he had to fill it quickly. He very much still loves her and he talks in the special about how he was very sensitive to Alice’s needs. He called the school and asked for advice in breaking it to her. He’s made sure she’s okay, that much I can tell.