Key Insights

• Flirtation and relationships were common among the young stars of Glee.
• Lea Michele and Cory Monteith dated for several years before his tragic death in 2013.
• Naya Rivera’s relationship with Mark Salling ended poorly, leading to her reflections in her memoir.
• Gwyneth Paltrow began dating Brad Falchuk after guest-starring on Glee.

Just like in the hallways of McKinley High, the Glee set featured a lot of flirtation and relationships between its young stars. (And even before the show, as Lea Michele revealed in her 2014 memoir Brunette Ambition that she and Matthew Morrison “actually dated back in for the day for a Broadway beat.”)

Michele and Cory Monteith, whose characters were one of the show’s most iconic couples, dated for several years before Monteith’s tragic death in 2013, while Blake Jenner and Melissa Benoist, who now stars on Supergirl, married in 2015 after meeting on the set in 2012 when they also played love interests; they split in 2016 and their divorce was finalized the following year.

Naya Rivera and Mark Salling briefly dated in the show’s earlier days and it wasn’t an amicable split, as Rivera would write in her 2016 memoir, “I think everyone should have that one relationship where you look back and ask yourself, ‘What the hell was I thinking?’ You’ll learn something and you won’t regret it. Unless, of course, that relationship was with someone who had a sizable stash of child porn on his computer. Then, by all means, regret everything.” Rivera was referring to Salling’s child pornography indictment in 2017. In January 2018, Salling committed suicide at the age of 35.

While they first met when she guest-starred on Glee, Gwyneth Paltrow didn’t begin dating future husband Brad Falchuk, one of Glee‘s co-creators, until she returned to the show in 2014, over a year after her split from Coldplay frontman Chris Martin.

“When you’re going through a divorce and you think about going out with somebody, it’s a weird thing,” she told Howard Stern of taking it slowly with Falchuk, a recently-divorced father of two. “So I don’t think it’s the same as being 23 and running into someone at a coffee shop. It’s just different. You have kids, you have divorce—it’s just a lot of stuff.”

They got married in October 2018.

While there were whispers of a romance between Kevin McHale (Artie) and Jenna Ushkowitz (Tina) during the show’s run, it turns out they were just in a showmance, which became the new of their hit podcast.