David Burtka was with a boyfriend when he met Neil Patrick Harris, who is now his spouse. Their initial encounter wasn’t really that memorable. However, they embarked on their first date just a few weeks later. Things got off to a good start, and one thing they both agreed on was having children together.
David Burtka’s husband’s not having children would have been a deal-breaker
Burtka and Harris met for the first time in 2004. Harris was unmarried at the time and had never been in a long-term relationship. Burtka was in a long-distance relationship with his then-boyfriend. Neither of them anticipated the situation to become romantic. But, when it happened, they were forthright about each other’s life goals.
As they revealed in their articles for Out in 2012, one of the key topics they addressed on their first date, which was on April 1, 2004, was having children. They were both interested in having children and had a plan for how they would approach motherhood. “We both decided that if we wanted to have kids, we didn’t want to do it too late in the game,” the How I Met Your Mother actor wrote in an Out essay. They did this because they wanted their parents to appreciate the joys of being grandparents.
“We wanted our parents to enjoy the procedure and to be youthful and vital enough to join us in throwing a ball,” he wrote. “or chasing them about without a walker.”
Burtka was more adamant about having children with the person he was dating. “I don’t believe we’d be together if he hadn’t wanted kids,” Burtka wrote in his post. He had always believed that family was the most important thing in life and that he was a better parent than anything else. Their same beliefs about starting a family together cemented the deal. They seldom clashed after they realized they had a similar aim to strive towards.
Gideon Scott and Harper Grace are the couple’s twins. They were born in October 2010 through surrogate. Two ladies were there during the procedure. The egg donor was the first, and the surrogate who bore their children to term was the second. Burtka even quipped on The Wendy Williams Show in 2019 that Harper Grace may be his biological kid and Gideon Scott could be Harris’. He arrived at such a conclusion by assessing and contrasting their characters.
The Relationship between David Burtka and Neil Patrick Harris
Harris was the one who initially felt Burtka’s attraction after their first encounter. “I originally fell for David harder than he fell for me,” he wrote. Burtka, on the other hand, took his time confessing his feelings for Harris, which the latter respected. They were so inextricably linked that moving in together didn’t seem like a huge thing. They did, however, move in together. They packed their possessions into a truck (they were living in Los Angeles at the time) and drove to Harlem, New York, stopping at their parents’ residences on the way.
“We slowly drove across America, loading up this truck, and by the time we came to New York, we had a new life full of furniture,” Harris said of their journey. Burtka refers to their first three years together as their “honeymoon phase.” After that, they settled in and contemplated marriage.
However, things were not that simple back then. Because gay marriage was still illegal at the time, they lived as each other’s boyfriends for the first seven years of their relationship, which Harris disliked. He enjoyed being a spouse and having one. Burtka proposed in 2007, on the same street corner where they initially met all those years before. Harris proposed in Santa Monica a year later.
They would have to wait till their big day. They both applauded the passage of the New York Marriage Equality Act in June 2011, but they did not marry straight immediately. Burtka and Harris married in September 2014 in Italy, with both of their fraternal twins present for the ceremony.