Adam Sandler will go down in history as many things, but after a recent award acceptance speech, he added another title to his roster: Unabashed wife guy.
On January 3, Sandler accepted the Chairman’s Award at the Palm Springs International Film Festival for his work in Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly. In his acceptance speech, Sandler imagined his life had he not been an actor. After he graduated college, his father told him to go chase his dreams for one year, Sandler said. If it didn’t work out, Sandler had a job offer to work for his father as an electrical contractor.
He went on to list a whole slew of things in his life that would probably be different if he never hit it big. He’d probably live in a smaller house, one with “a few less” statues of himself. Maybe he’d know how to charge his own phone. He likely wouldn’t have just gone on vacation to Hawaii, trading ocean dips for swims in the pond “next to the nuclear power plant.”
One thing that wouldn’t have changed? His “way out of my league” wife.
“I sometimes think about it, [if] I didn’t click in that year and I did go work for my dad, what my life would be right now,” he said. “First off, I’m thinking I’d probably still be married to my wife, Jackie. That’s destiny. True love. Nothing stops that.”
There’s been much ado about wife guys online, and with fair reason. It’s definitely true that wife guys—guys who talk and post about their incredible, hot, amazing wives all the time—can get a little, well, weird. But Atlantic editor Jeremy Gordon argued in an essay last year that being a wife guy just comes down to loving your wife—and what’s so weird about that?
“I, a guy who loves his wife, can’t help but conclude that valuable terrain is being ceded when we think poorly of the wife guy. Many men, accustomed to bottling up their feelings, are already afraid to show what’s in their heart and on their mind,” Gordon wrote. “If some of them are actually moved to express their love publicly and unabashedly—is this so wrong?
If you posed this question to Sandler, the answer would undoubtedly be no.
Adam and Jackie Sandler were married in 2003 after meeting on the set of Big Daddy in 1999. In 2020, Adam Sandler posted on Instagram about meeting Jackie, describing their immediate connection: “22 years ago today we locked eyes and fell deep. Looking forward to the next 22, young lady. Love you my forever girl.”
It’s hard to imagine how an electrical contractor would have met a former model turned actor/producer like Jackie, but true love always finds a way. The pair have two daughters, Sadie, 19, and Sunny, 17, who Sandler described as “sweet and talented” in his Palm Springs speech. Instead, Sandler imagined he’d have “10 boys that are dumb as shit.” They’d grow up and tell him they want to be actors, to which he’d tell them they had one year to try to chase their dreams, and if they didn’t make it, they’d work for him.
“They’d say, ‘OK, well what do you do?’” Sandler dreamed in his speech. “I’d say, ‘What do I do? Same thing you guys are gonna do. Work for grandpa, you fuckin’ nepo babies.’”