As Harris and Bush navigated these changes, they leaned on each other and the other women in their friendship circles.
“I didn’t expect to find love in this support system,” the actress wrote in an April 2024 essay for Glamour. “I don’t know how else to say it other than: I didn’t see it until I saw it. And I think it’s very easy not to see something that’s been in front of your face for a long time when you’d never looked at it as an option and you had never been looked at as an option. What I saw was a friend with her big, happy life. And now I know she thought the same thing about me.”
But it wasn’t until Bush asked Harris out that they realized they could be something more.
“Our friends were trying to set her up with someone and I was like, ‘If she’s ready to date, she’s f–king going on a date with me. Sorry, uh uh, no f–king way,'” the John Tucker Must Die alum recalled on her podcast Work in Progress in July. “And people were like, ‘Wait, what?’ She even said to me, ‘Hold the phone, I always thought you were straight.’ And I was like, ‘I always thought you were happy. But we’re both f–king single. What are we doing?'”
Remembering how they “were f–king cackling,” Bush continued, she told Harris, “‘Yeah, dude I never looked at you as an option.’ And she was like, ‘I never looked at you as an option.’ And it’s cause we weren’t options.”
But after their date—which Bush noted in her Glamour essay was a four-and-a-half hour-long meal and “truly one of the most surreal experiences” of her life—they decided they were both interested in the option of seeing where their connection could go.