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Zach Gilford and Liana Liberato are embracing Valentine’s Day 2026 with a heartwarming display of affection.
On Saturday, February 14, Liberato, 30, shared a snapshot on her Instagram Stories capturing a tender moment with Gilford, 44. The image featured the Stuck in Love star casually dressed in a navy hoodie, embracing her boyfriend. While their heads were cropped out of the frame, the couple’s romantic kiss was unmistakable.
Accompanying the sweet photo, Liberato included an emoji of a heart-sealed envelope, hinting playfully that she had another special person in her life besides Gilford.
“My valentine,” she captioned a follow-up Instagram Story slide of her black-and-white cat.
As celebrities like Demi Lovato and Simone Biles celebrate love on this special day, Lovato shared her own heartfelt message on Instagram, marking her first Valentine’s Day as a married couple with husband Jordan Lutes. “Our first valentines married!!” she wrote, expressing gratitude for Lutes’ presence in her life. “Thank [you] for making every day better and making me the happiest and luckiest human alive.”
In November 2025, Us Weekly exclusively revealed that Liberato and Gilford began their romance after meeting on the set of Criminal Minds: Evolution.
“They started dating after they worked together,” a source told Us at the time, noting the pair’s romance was still “relatively new.”
Prior to finding love with Liberato, Gilford was married to Kiele Sanchez for 12 years. Gilford filed for divorce in April 2025, citing irreconcilable differences.Gilford and Sanchez, 48, share two kids and also work together on Criminal Minds.
“It’s actually harder,” Gilford exclusively told Us in 2024 of starring opposite his then-wife. “It’s harder because I don’t want to hold a gun to my wife’s head. … It just happened to be that the nature of these scenes were pretty gross. Honestly, all those scenes are so f***ed up. I’ll only speak for myself. Kiele can obviously speak for herself, but it felt gross [bringing those darker moments to life together].”
According to Gilford, he and Sanchez weren’t cast for Criminal Minds at the same time.
“I was on my way to work, and I said goodbye to Kiele. And she looked at her phone and said, ‘That’s weird. I just got an offer to play your wife on Criminal Minds,’” Gilford told Us. “Then, Erica [Messer, the showrunner] told me, ‘We didn’t want to put pressure on you or Kiele. We just wanted to make it very professional.’”
He continued at the time, “I think they were like, ‘Well, if Zach’s doing this then the only way we’ll get an actress of Kiele’s caliber to play this part is because she’s married to him. And it’ll be like a homie hookup.’ Once they got Kiele, they definitely leaned into it and they’re like, ‘Well, we have this actress so let’s write to her.’”
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Gilford and Sanchez, who met on the set of 2010’s The Matadors, have also shared the screen on Kingdom and The Purge: Anarchy. Sanchez later wrote an episode of The Fall of the House of Usher, of which Gilford had a leading role.
“We’ve worked together several times and in very different situations,” Gilford recalled to Us in 2024. “But there’s a theme on set when you are coworkers but also a married couple. It’s kind of trying to walk that tightrope. There’s times where I want to [support her]. Like, if she’s having a discussion [with a director or a writer], I want to be like, ‘Yeah, Kiele is right!’ But that’s not my place. Kiele can talk for herself — she’s a very strong woman.”
As for Liberato, she has often kept her dating life private through the years.