Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds made an agreement when they started dating: 'not to work at the same time'

• Blake Lively says she and Ryan Reynolds chose not to work at the same time when they started dating.
• Lively opened up about her relationship during an interview with Amber Tamblyn, per Entertainment Tonight.

Blake Lively says that she and Ryan Reynolds agreed "not to work at the same time" when they started dating.

Lively opened up about her relationship in an interview with her "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" costar Amber Tamblyn on Tamblyn's Substack video series," Further Ado," per Entertainment Tonight.

"When Ryan and I got together, we made a rule not to work at the same time," Lively told Tamblyn. "So that we could always prioritize our personal life."

Reynolds and Lively got together in 2011, when Lively was still working on "Gossip Girl" and had a demanding schedule.

"I'm used to working hard and going and going and going and going and not stopping," Lively said. "Especially, 'Gossip Girl' was six years of my life, and we were sometimes shooting three episodes at once."

The decision to not have overlapping work schedules took a lot of effort to uphold, Lively said.

"That takes working really hard when we're not. Just like financial planning and sustaining that; it takes balance," Lively said.

This is not the first time that the couple has spoken about how they manage their parenting duties on top of their work schedules.

"I think I want my kids to have a pretty normal schedule. I mean, for many years when my wife Blake would shoot a film, I would not shoot a film," Reynolds said during a 2021 LinkedIn interview. "And I would be with the kids and vice versa, so we sort of trade-off. We never really worked at the same time."

The couple got married in 2012 and have four children: James, 9, Inez, 7, Betty, 4, and a one-year-old they have yet to reveal the name of.

Although they've been spotted in public with their kids, the two of them prefer to keep their family out of the spotlight.

"Ryan had a nice, normal upbringing, and we want our kids to have the same normal life that we had," Lively told Marie Claire in a 2016 interview. "We don't ever want to rob them of what we had because then we'd feel really selfish."

A representative for Lively did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours.