Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for The Weinstein Company
“He is not my boyfriend, but he is not my best friend,” she told the magazine. “I guess you could describe our relationship as a ‘romantically charged camaraderie with loud arguments,’ but I don’t think Facebook would accept this as a new status.”
On Watch What Happens Live in October 2017, Kaling, who was two months away from giving birth to daughter Katharine, said, “I can’t speak [for] him, but I think for me it was challenging to be in your mid-twenties—I’m such a sentimental person and I take things very hard—but that’s the nice thing about long friendships. That was, like, 12 years ago when that happened, so you get over things like that, but it totally was very challenging.”
Theirs was obviously a bond worth salvaging, though. Asked if she and Novak were secretly dating for the umpteenth time, Kaling told GoodHousekeeping.com last year, “If I was on the outside looking at it, I would think the same thing. But the truth is that B.J. is so much more like family now than a platonic friend. He’s the godfather to my daughter, he comes over like once a week. Sometimes he’ll come over just to hang out with her.”
She continued, “But when you’ve known someone for as long as I’ve known him—the time that we met each other, which was like 24. Now, we’re both almost 40. It’s such a long time that he truly is just a part of my family.”
(Originally published March 4, 2017, at 6 a.m. PT)
