Dane Cook Met Future Fiancee Kelsi Taylor At A 'Game Night' Before Her 18th Birthday
The age gap is more than 26 years.
Kelsi Taylor (front), Dane Cook (back) and friends at a game night. Right: Dane Cook and Kelsi Taylor in 2017.
Comedian Dane Cook, 50, is taking a lot of heat online after getting engaged to 23-year-old girlfriend Kelsi Taylor, whom he apparently met and befriended before she was legally an adult.
The couple announced their engagement on Tuesday after dating for five years. However, the internet has been asking questions about their timeline, given that she was 18 years old when they went public in May of 2017.
"We met at a game night I host at my place," Cook said during an Instagram Q&A in 2018, per HuffPost. "We were friends for a while and soon after fell in like with each other and then upgraded to love."
It's unclear exactly when things turned romantic or how long they knew each other before they started dating.
So how did these two get together?
Here's what we know.
Taylor was born on October 26, 1998, a few years before Cook became a famous comedy star in the early 2000s.
We also know from Instagram that she was attending game nights at Cook's house in early October of 2016, which would've been a few weeks before her 18th birthday.
Cook has posted a few group photos that included her around that time, and it looks like she was at multiple game nights that October.
Of course, playing games in a group doesn't mean they were together, and there's nothing to suggest that things got inappropriate before she reached the age of 18.
In other words, we still don't know when they "upgraded to love."
However, we do know that they were going out to events together in early 2017. They photographed themselves at a concert with friends in March 2017, and they each posted the same pic of themselves hugging in April of that year.
They made it official in May 2017 and their respective Instagram pages filled up with couple photos shortly after that.
Fast-forward five years and they're engaged to be married.
"Feeling the best I've ever felt," Cook tweeted on Tuesday, after the news broke in PEOPLE magazine.
Although Cook has talked about the age gap between himself and Taylor in the past, he hasn't said much about it since getting engaged.
Instead, he's been sharing plenty of "sappy" photos and thanking all his well-wishers for their support.
"The love of my life is now my fiancé!" he wrote on Tuesday. "To everyone sending us love and positive notes we appreciate it tremendously."