Sophia Bush Explains How Her Romantic Relationship With Ashlyn Harris Began

Sophia Bush is revealing the unique origins of her relationship with former US soccer star Ashlyn Harris: an ad hoc divorcée support group.

In a deeply personal essay for her April 2024 Glamour cover story, Bush reveals that the pair first met in 2019 and became good friends. However, as Bush began to navigate her divorce from her now ex-husband in summer 2023, she ended up connecting with other women in her life who were dealing with their own relationship struggles.

Over time the women formed a community where they opened up to one another about what they were dealing with, and Harris soon joined in as she dealt with her split from her then wife, a fellow soccer star with whom she shares two young children. For Bush, the group was a lifeline.

“For those of us who had no solution in sight or Hail Marys left, having this community changed everything,” she writes. “We really wrapped one another up in support. It was tragic and hard. But it was also beautiful.”

The women, she says, would share inspirational quotes and books with one another, life advice, or just silly TikToks and memes. They created a “Begin Again” Amazon shopping list with items a woman may need when moving out of a shared space, which Bush says has now been shared with many others who need such a resource. Eventually Bush and Harris's relationship began to deepen in ways neither of them saw coming.

“I didn’t expect to find love in this support system,” she writes. “I don’t know how else to say it other than: I didn’t see it until I saw it. And I think it’s very easy not to see something that’s been in front of your face for a long time when you’d never looked at it as an option and you had never been looked at as an option. What I saw was a friend with her big, happy life. And now I know she thought the same thing about me.”

And the pair owes one more thing to their girl gang. Sophia Bush says that it was this same group of women who pointed out to herself and Harris that maybe their connection was more than just friends. She says the women pointed out that “we’d finish each other’s sentences or be deeply affected by the same things.”

After some thinking, Bush decided to ask Harris out on a date. It went, let's say, super well, and they ended up talking for more than four hours.

“In hindsight, maybe it all had to happen slowly and then suddenly all at once,” she muses. “Maybe it was all fated. Maybe it really is a version of invisible string theory. I don’t really know. But I do know that for a sparkly moment I felt like maybe the universe had been conspiring for me. And that feeling that I have in my bones is one I’ll hold on to no matter where things go from here.”

Originally Appeared on Glamour