Christina Applegate knew her marriage to first husband Johnathon Schaech was going to end before she even walked down the aisle.
“The worst thing was the moment I walked around the corner and into the ceremony,” Applegate, 54, wrote in her debut memoir, You With the Sad Eyes, which was released on Tuesday, March 3. “One of my favorite songs was playing, and when I looked hard at the face of my husband-to-be, I thought, ‘Oh f***. F***, oh f***.’”
Applegate and Schaech, now 56, tied the knot in 2001. She “never considered” stopping the wedding before it happened.
“For a start, I was halfway down the aisle. I kept thinking, ‘Don’t be that guy. Don’t be that guy. Don’t be that guy. You’re sabotaging. You’re sabotaging. You’re sabotaging,’” the actress recalled. “Because there I was in my custom gown, the center of this beautiful f***ing wedding filled with all the perfect that you could possibly imagine.”
She added, “I knew right then that this man was not it for me.”
The Married … With Children actress wrote that the wedding was “a master class in anal perfectionism” overall, with her insisting it was a dry event.
“If I went to a wedding now and they didn’t serve alcohol, I’d leave, thank you very much,” she wrote, noting that the whole ceremony was “choreographed within an inch of its life.”
Even though Applegate did eventually make it down the aisle, she knew Schaech wasn’t The One as far back as their first date.
“I have advice for women,” she wrote. “If you go on a first date with a guy and you don’t like his shoes, run — shoes are a telltale sign of whether or not a relationship will last.”
Applegate explained, “For our first date, he had shown up in boots, but not even cowboy boots. I think they were supposed to look like a cowboy boot, but they missed the mark by a wide margin.”
For the entire date, Applegate fixated on the shoes.
“No one should wear such things, but especially not if you live in Los Angeles, California,” she wrote. “I remember thinking, ‘Those shoes are so bad. Bad shoes, bad shoes, bad shoes, bad.’”
Why did she stay? Applegate wrote that “another voice” in her head thought that Schaech was “the right person” for her.
“He’s got his s*** together. He’s attractive. He has a career. We were just very different. I’m scrappy. I tell f***ed-up jokes. I can be offensive and rough around the edges. He was none of those things.”
Schaech filed for divorce in December 2005. Their split was finalized by August 2007. He moved on with Jana Kramer, and they married in July 2010, seven months after getting engaged. Their separation was announced in August 2010, and the divorce was finalized in June 2011. Schaech has since found love with Julie Solomon, whom he married in July 2013. They share a son, Camden, born in September 2023, and a daughter, Lillian, born in July 2020.
Applegate, meanwhile, married Martyn LeNoble in February 2013. They are the parents of daughter Sadie, 15.
You With the Sad Eyes is out now.
