Sterling K. Brown knows a thing or two about marriage, and he’s willing to share.

The “Paradise” star opened up while discussing “This Is Us” characters Kate and Toby’s marriage and divorce with his former costars and“That Was Us” podcast co-hosts Mandy Moore andChris Sullivan, and shared the small, steady practices that have made his marriage to actress Ryan Michelle Bathé strong for nearly two decades. And it’s really simple.

“We keep choosing each other,” Brown said during a live taping of the podcast, where he reflected on the couple’s nearly 20 years together ahead of their March anniversary. 

Brown and Bathé’s relationship began as college sweethearts at Stanford in the late 1990s. They then survived a breakup, reconvened, and married in 2006, and now they share two sons, Andrew and Amaré. 

The actor told the audience that marriage, for them, is a daily choice and a practice of returning to each other even when life gets messy. Those small acts of recommitment have become a staple in his public conversations about family. 

The couple has also turned their real-life conversations into a public project. Their podcast “We Don’t Always Agree” (launched in 2024) explores marriage, parenting, faith, and race and has been praised for modeling honest partnership. They’ve used the platform to normalize disagreement and to show how couples can work through hard things without erasing differences. The podcast even won an NAACP Image Award in 2025!

Brown has also shared playful, but pointed rituals that keep intimacy alive, like the couple’s “six-second kiss” as one example of physical touch used to reconnect during their busy lives. He’s joked in interviews about leaning on his “This Is Us” character, Randall, to remind himself to stay present. Brown and Bathé reportedly use the adage “WWRD — What Would Randall Do?” to nudge more empathetic responses in daily life. 

For Brown, the takeaway is about the steady work of showing up, choosing your partner again and again, in ways large and tiny. As he reflected on the stage during the live podcast, the message landed plainly: long relationships don’t rely on grand gestures alone, but on habits that say, every day, “I choose you.”