Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this column, we’ll be examining the celebrity couples that give us hope for our own romantic futures and trying to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds.

Andrew Garfield is one of the few Hollywood men whose dating life I will always take an active, invested, non-horrified interest in; the Social Network star previously dated actor Emma Stone and has described himself as heterosexual when asked, adding, “I have an openness to any impulses that may arise within me at any time.” (Well, yes! Can leading men have this straight-but-not-narrow energy?)

Barbaro, Garfield, Eddie Redmayne, and W magazine’s Lynn Hirschberg in January. A few months later, Barbaro and Garfield would attend performances of John Proctor Is the Villain and Oh, Mary! together in New York.

Photo: Getty Images

Garfield has never remotely been the type to bro-crow on podcasts hosted by sex offenders about all the LA ladies he’s spending time with, and for that, I treasure him wholeheartedly—which makes it particularly exciting to me that he’s reportedly been dating A Complete Unknown star Monica Barbaro since early 2025. There haven’t been a ton of public sightings of the couple yet, and they haven’t actually confirmed their relationship (which tracks, given Garfield’s famous and hard-won privacy when it comes to his romantic life), but they allegedly linked up after the 2025 Oscars and the Met Gala, and on Monday, May 26, they rang in Memorial Day weekend together in Malibu in the esteemed company of Barbaro’s dog Augustus, who was clad in a tasteful yet chic cone.

I have a lot of boring, LA-dog-mom questions about how, exactly, a pup navigates the beach while in a cone (wouldn’t it get insanely sandy?), but I have to admit that I’m sort of entranced by this notoriously camera-shy and as-yet-un-hard-launched couple making the oh-so-SoCal trek to Malibu together. Personally, I haven’t ventured to my usual beach spot since the fires, but I’m glad to know that a) it is technically still possible to hit up Malibu and b) even the most A-list of celebrities are doing it…which must mean it’s safe for the rest of us, right? Can Andrew Garfield text me and let me know if the Pacific Coast Highway has reopened?

As someone who’s lived in LA for five nonconsecutive years (but will always remain an anxious New Yorker at heart, as you can tell from my flurry of questions about dog-health procedure and beach safety), I know there’s something extremely special about your first trip out to the beach with your beloved. Obviously, Barbaro and Garfield could have been making surf trips for months without us being any the wiser, but something about their body language makes me think this is their inaugural Malibu trip together. (Also, you can usually trust beachside paparazzi to snap shots of literally anyone even vaguely famous venturing west.) I remember meeting a bunch of my now-partner’s friends at Rosie’s Dog Beach in Long Beach early on, and I was definitely nervous, but I’m pretty sure I was also as happy as Garfield and Barbaro look, toting their little white dog (in all his cone-wearing glory) down to the water. We love LA, don’t we, folks?