Tommy Dorfman Reveals She Secretly Married Her Longtime Girlfriend Months Ago
Tommy Dorfman is firmly in her newlywed era.
The “13 Reasons Why” and “Love, Victor” actor surprised fans this week by confirming on Instagram that she and her longtime girlfriend, Elise, were married “towards the end of last year.” She included a carousel of photos showing the two in their wedding dresses with the announcement.
Dorfman’s post coincided with the publication of a lengthy Vogue essay in which she spoke about her relationship with Elise, whom she met on the dating app Hinge.
“We got engaged two months into dating,” she explained. “To our credit, we waited a full 12 months before moving in together, so you can’t say we U-Hauled (though one might argue taking in a Great Dane puppy at our six-month mark was a smidge irresponsible). That’s the thing about falling in love though; your responsibility barometer isn’t always where it should be. Love, for us, required that nauseating combination of naivete, delusion, and fate.”
Dorfman first announced her engagement in a 2022 appearance on Rachel Bilson’s “Broad Ideas” podcast, but did not disclose the identity of her fiancée. Noting the “embarrassing amount of headlines” that the news received at the time, Dorfman said she and Elise “decided as a couple to keep things private until we chose to invite others in.”
As for the nuptials themselves, the actor noted only that they took place in Los Angeles last fall.
“Our love had formed and grown in a contained bubble, so why couldn’t our marriage be on the same terms?” she wrote in Vogue, later adding that the couple “ended the day at a concert without telling a soul what we’d done.”
The photos that appeared in Vogue and on Instagram, she added, were taken after she and Elise returned to Brooklyn, New York City, where they held a reception with their friends and family.
Dorfman, best known for her portrayal of Ryan Shaver on “13 Reasons Why,” publicly reintroduced herself as a transgender woman in a 2021 essay published by Time magazine. The following year, she split from husband Peter Zurkuhlen, to whom she’d been married since 2016.
“I knew I was interested in women in a way that I hadn’t really been aware of since high school,” she later told Bilson in their “Broad Ideas” chat. “I was really scared to admit that I was perhaps attracted to women because I felt I had such safe relationships with all the women in my life because they thought of me as a gay man.”
As for her relationship with Elise, which was then in its early days, she added, “I fell in love with someone who doesn’t fetishize me.”
