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The One That Didn’t Get Away

Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher are expecting their second child; it’s the stuff of fan fiction

by
Rachel Shukert
June 17, 2016
Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images
Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis share a kiss during Game 2 of the 2016 NBA Finals between the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers at ORACLE Arena in Oakland, California, June 5, 2016. Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images
Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images
Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis share a kiss during Game 2 of the 2016 NBA Finals between the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers at ORACLE Arena in Oakland, California, June 5, 2016. Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images

For those of you who like to keep track of such things (like this column, apparently), there’s a new famous Jewish baby on the way! It was recently announced that actress Mila Kunis—the star of the fraught bat-mitzvah-coming-of-age story that is Black Swan (that was the subtext of that movie, right?), and this summer’s Bad Moms, a comedy about women who decide they want somewhat more out of life than attending, constantly and maniacally, to the organic perfection of their children (in my day, just called them “Moms”)—is expecting her second child with husband Ashton Kutcher. (Kutcher, the star of Netflix’s new series The Ranch, is a former star of other stuff he was also the star of, including his early marriage to proto-cougar Demi Moore.)

The long-time couple, who married last July, already have a 20-month-old daughter, Wyatt Isabelle, to whom they are the kind of attentive low-key L.A. parents you see hiking through Runyon Canyon or at local farmers markets, again with dogs and strollers. So, you know, parents in L.A.

If it sounds like I’m being snide, it’s really only to amuse myself. I’m as excited as anybody—that is, I’m as excited as anybody who doesn’t personally know the family and has no real stake in its decision to add to its number—could possibly be.

I wasn’t particularly into That ‘70s Show, the sitcom that launched both Kutcher and Kunis’s respective careers. Well, it wasn’t that I disliked it, it’s just that the show’s run aligned perfectly with the oddly long period of my life in which I didn’t own a television, a time that now seems as foreign as a world without cell phones or plentiful grocery store sushi. In other words, the fan fiction element of their relationship is somewhat lost on me.

But the Kutcher-Kunises do provide an answer to a much more pressing an universal question that watchers of all manner of television shows, past and present, can relate to: The high school crush, or maybe even boyfriend, that you still think about sometimes when you have a fight with your current boyfriend, or have just had a few drinks and are in that mood. You know, those times when it feels extremely necessary to really, deeply interrogate the terms of your life to the few friends who are still conscious yet incapacitated enough to listen to you.

What would happen if you were both unexpectedly single, and bumped into each other again after all these years? Would you hit it off, decide to go steady once again? Would you then fall in love, into an emotion that is all the more ardent and intense, yet comfortable and familiar, because of your shared history together? Would you get married and have four dogs and two babies and live happily ever after?

If Mila and Ashton are any indication: the answer is a resounding yes. They are the fan fiction we write about, and maybe even hope for. Mazel tov to all.

Rachel Shukert is the author of the memoirs Have You No Shame? and Everything Is Going To Be Great,and the novel Starstruck. She is the creator of the Netflix show The Baby-Sitters Club, and a writer on such series as GLOW and Supergirl. Her Twitter feed is @rachelshukert.