In the words of the great Peyton Sawyer, sometimes all you need is one — but it may take a while to get there.
The characters on One Tree Hill were in countless love triangles, went on romantic excursions and even got married in high school. In real life, things weren’t always so magical.
Although some of the stars of the 2003 drama chose to date outside the show, others found love on set. When the series first debuted on The WB (later airing on The CW), Sophia Bush began dating costar Chad Michael Murray. On screen, their characters, Brooke Davis and Lucas Scott, entered a relationship as well.
The Cinderella Story star proposed in 2004, and they married one year later in April 2005. The duo split five months after the nuptials and finalized their divorce in 2006. Despite their messy breakup behind the scenes, they continued working alongside each other until his exit in 2009.
“We were two stupid kids who had no business being in a relationship in the first place,” she said in a Bravo interview in 2014. “To all the other costars who’ve worked it out, more power to you.”
Other stars of the drama found love elsewhere. Danneel Harris, for example, began dating Supernatural‘s Jensen Ackles in 2006. Soon after, Harris introduced Hilarie Burton Morgan to one of Ackles’ costars, Jeffrey Dean Morgan.
“I happened to be single and Jensen said, ‘I’ve got a girl you should meet,’” Morgan said in 2015. “So I went to a bar and I met Hilarie at a bar with Jensen and Danneel, and the rest is history.”
In her book The Rural Diaries, Burton revealed that three days after their date, he flew her from Wilmington to New Mexico, where he was filming a movie. “Jeffrey and I weren’t made for dating. He was the man I was gonna get old and boring with. Instead of late nights out at clubs or wining and dining, at night we’d settle in and watch an episode of Lonesome Dove. We decided that when we had a kid, we’d name him Gus after Robert DuVall’s character,” she wrote in the 2020 memoir. “As the credits rolled, Jeffrey turned to me and asked, ‘Do you just want to do this? Do you want to try and have a family?’ We’d known each other less than a month.”
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Scroll through the gallery below for more of the cast’s dating lives: