Troian Bellisario Jokes She’s ‘Just Dating’ Husband Patrick J. Adams After Years of Long Distance

Troian Bellisario has been with Patrick J. Adams for nearly two decades, but she likes to joke that they’re really only in the early stages of their relationship.

The longtime couple met in 2009. But quickly after they started dating, Bellisario, 39, booked Pretty Little Liars and Adams, 43, was cast on Suits. This left them having to navigate a long-distance relationship right off the bat.

Now, it’s something that they still joke about. “We always used to joke that, like, the number of in-room hours [we’ve spent together] is real low,” Bellisario said on the March 4 episode of Jesse Tyler Ferguson‘s Dinner’s on Me podcast. “Like, we’re basically just dating.”

When she met Adams, Bellisario had “just graduated college” and was starring in a play in L.A. that he was also in.

“We met, started falling in love with each other, and then I had to leave that [play] to go shoot the pilot of Pretty Little Liars. And so I was really devastated,” the On Call actress recalled. “Because I actually thought I was falling in love with this guy… And I was falling in love with the show, and I really wanted to do theater.”

“And so it was kind of an amazing thing to me when I came back and we started a relationship. It was really surprising to me — very exciting for me,” she continued.

The couple recently celebrated their eighth wedding anniversary, she said, but have been together for 15 years, though she jokes, “Again, in the room? Three [years] tops. We’re such young lovers.”

Ferguson, who has dealt with long distance in his marriage to Justin Mikita, asked Bellisario if she and Adams feel like there’s a “getting to know you process again” after periods of distance.

“For sure,” she said. “We call it the reentry period.”

“You’ve been living apart, so you’ve been living on your own, and you form your own habits. Like, when he comes home from shooting on location, does he take his coffee the same way? You know, maybe I’ve gotten used to waking up and going for a run, and all of a sudden, there’s somebody in my bed that I wanna spend time with, but I’m like, well, this is what I do [in the morning],” she shared.

It becomes even more complicated given their family is involved, as the pair share daughters Aurora, 6, and Elliott, 3. “That’s really hard to navigate with the kids,” she said.

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Despite their longevity, the distance did cause some problems for the couple, especially early on.

On Sophia Bush‘s podcast, Work in Progress, Bellisario recalled breaking up with Adams during the first season of Pretty Little Liars, which prompted the actor to pull out every stop and get a guest starring role on the show to win her back.

“He was like, ‘Okay, well, I know that we just broke up, but I’m gonna be at your table read and I’m gonna be on your set. So, you know, we should probably talk.’ And then we fully talked — which I think you know what that means — and got back together,” she recalled.

They never ended up filming together on PLL, but she said, “It is a hilarious part of our history. He put in the work.”