If you believe the tabloids—and yes, we’re going to have to do some suspension of disbelief with the TMZ citations in this one, folks—Grande and her husband Dalton Gomez couldn’t hack it long-distance in a post-pandemic world. Grande first officially stepped out as a (supposedly) single girl at Wimbledon with her Wicked co-star Jonathan Bailey, where they sat with Andrew Garfield, to the delight of all. Hanging out with your gay BFF in the aftermath of a breakup is a time-honored tradition of many a theater kid, and Arianators everywhere welcomed this signal that a new era was on the horizon.

Yet there was another twist in the story to come, another classic theater kid tradition to honor: the showmance. Enter Ethan Slater, Broadway’s SpongeBob SquarePants and Wicked’s Boq. Slater was reportedly married to his high school sweetheart, Lilly Jay, and the couple had recently welcomed their first child together when he met Grande on the set of Wicked. The young family even reportedly hung out with Grande when Jay came to visit the set. “Ariana met their baby and even held him,” a source for the Daily Mail claimed. “They had dinners together in London—and Ariana told Lilly that she wanted to have a baby one day and that she couldn’t wait to start a family.”