After Thought: Kumail Nanjiani Proposed to His Wife Three Years After Their Marriage

An orchestrated proposal is often considered to be an essential step toward marriage. But nowadays, many couples consider it “obsolete or superfluous,” as The New York Times notes, adding that “some could do without the engagement ring as well.” But what about those who choose to propose after being married? Kumail Nanjiani has some pointers. 

The Pakistani American actor recently revealed on “The Jennifer Hudson Show” that he popped the question to his wife  Emily V. Gordon, three years after their marriage. He began planning after his wife revealed that she wished he had proposed to her before tying the knot.  

A few years later when the couple was in Montauk, New York, Nanjiani booked “a really small hotel room on the beach,” he told the audience. At midnight, while the two were playing video games, Nanjiani asked his wife to go outside to the beach with him. He then popped the question to his wife. “The best way to do a surprise proposal is to do it three years after you’re married,” he told the audience. 

The couple recently celebrated their 16th wedding anniversary in Chicago, where they first met. According to a 2017 New Yorker profile, the couple first met at one of Nanjiani’s standup gigs in Chicago, where he was “lovingly heckled” by Gordon at the bar. Rather than get offended at the gesture, the two became friends after running into each other again two nights later. “They began seeing each other on and off,” Bustle noted, adding that “it didn’t fully turn romantic right away.” Gordon had just been married and divorced, and Nanjiani “hadn’t built up the courage yet to reject his parents’ plan of an arranged marriage to a Pakistani Muslim woman.

They told Cosmopolitan that they first got married in secret at a Chicago courthouse, then held a massive Pakistani ceremony with Nanjiani’s family that lasted for three days. “Years later, after moving to New York and not telling anyone they met that they were married, they held a reception for friends to announce they were lying the whole time,” according to Bustle.

In 2017, the couple wrote their 2017 independent film “The Big Sick” about their own relationship, with Nanjiani playing a character based on himself. The film went on to be nominated for the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

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Nanjiani has lent his voice to Benjamin Renner’s recently released animated film “Migration,” about the Mallard family of ducks convincing their overprotective father Mack (Nanjiani) to go on the vacation of a lifetime as they migrate from New England, through New York City, and ultimately down to the Bahamas.