Over the years, pop culture trends may constantly change, but there’s one thing you can count on: Mindy Kaling and B.J. Novak’s relationship is always super confusing. Mindy’s stayed booked and busy over the years, from her start as a writer and actor on The Office, to creating a ton of hit TV series like The Mindy Project and Sex Lives of College Girls, to most recently getting her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And through it all, B.J. is there by her side, even when we’re not really sure what to make of their friendship.
When Mindy received her Hollywood Walk of Fame star on February 18, B.J. was there to give a speech full of praise and inside jokes. He called her his “soup snake,” which sounds like a pretty cozy nickname if you ask me. And Mindy reciprocated with a lot of love for B.J. “He’s such an important and integral part of my family that sometimes I forget the reason that I know him is because we worked together professionally,” she said at the event.
Despite all the evidence, Mindy and B.J. claim to be just friends, making them one of the most iconic non-couples in celebrity history. But there’s definitely more to their situationship than “just friends.” The lore of Mindy Kaling and B.J. Novak’s relationship is long and messy, including a period when they actually did date. So settle in, because we have a lot to unpack. Here’s the breakdown of their relationship timeline to help you understand their complicated friendship.
Mindy Kaling and B.J. Novak’s Relationship History
Mindy and B.J. on The Office
Mindy and B.J. met in 2004 when they both started working on the show The Office. As both writers and performers (Mindy played Kelly Kapoor and B.J. played Ryan Howard), they spent a lot of time on set — and with each other. That led to an on-again/off-again dating sitch that lasted until 2007.
“No one, including us, ever really knew, ‘Is this dating? Is this not dating?’” B.J. told Vulture in 2012. “We were never really dating, we were never really not dating. We didn’t know. No one knew. All you’d know for sure is that you’d always find one of us next to the other, even if we weren’t getting along.”
Honestly, this sounds like most situationships I know, so can’t fault them too much.
Mindy and B.J.’s Friendship
After they both left The Office and broke off any romance between them, their friendship stayed strong… maybe a little too strong. B.J. told Entertainment Weekly in 2013 that his friendship with Mindy sometimes got in the way of other relationships. “We are pretty inseparable best friends with a lot of chemistry ourselves, and we’re not dating,” he said. “Whenever we date anyone else, I think there’s a period where the person is very skeptical of our friendship.”
Even though B.J. called them best friends, Mindy seemed to have a little bit of a different take for a while. In 2014, Mindy went on Howard Stern and said that B.J. broke her heart, and in 2015, she was reluctant to define their relationship in an interview with InStyle. “I will freely admit: My relationship with BJ Novak is weird as hell,” she said. “He is not my boyfriend, but he is not my best friend. I guess you could describe our relationship as a ‘romantically charged camaraderie with loud arguments,’ but I don’t think Facebook would accept this as a new status.”
B.J. Is Mindy’s Kids’ Godfather
Mindy surprised fans with the announcement of her first kid, Katherine Swati, in 2017, and since then has had two more kids: Spencer Avu, and Anne. Although she’s kept the identity of her kids’ dad a secret, rumors have very loudly circulated that it’s B.J. They’ve kept mostly quiet, but they have revealed that B.J. is their godfather, and it sounds like he’s practically a dad to the kids anyway. Mindy told TODAY, “He said the funniest thing, he was like, ‘Can you sue for god-paternity rights?” I feel like that’s going a step above normal god-parent commitments, but who am I to judge?
Jokes About Mindy and B.J.’s Situationship
To this day, Mindy and B.J. deny any current romantic entanglements between them, but they’re totally willing to joke about the weirdness of their dynamic. At the 2022 Emmy Awards, they presented an award together and joked about having their busy schedules when they worked on The Office. “That show, that would take up your whole life. No time for other projects,” B.J. said. Then Mindy added, “No time for a social life. You had no choice but to form insanely complicated relationships with your costars.”
Then, when B.J. presented Mindy with the Norman Lear Achievement Award in Television at the 2023 Producers Guild Awards, he called their relationship a “tumultuous, romantic, toxic, boundary-less mess.” Kind of a rough way to describe a friend, but, hey, whatever works for them.
Even with all the history between them, Mindy has ultimately put a nail in the coffin of the idea of romance with B.J. “He’s really part of our family, but we’ve known each other for a long, long time and I think anyone who’s been friends with someone for 18, 19 years and at one point dated and now doesn’t, they maybe understand this,” Mindy said on The Drew Barrymore Show in 2022. “You have exes that you wouldn’t necessarily marry now.”
It sounds like Mindy and B.J. are staying in the (very messy) friend zone… at least for now.
