Inside Craig Melvin's Winning Marriage to Lindsay Czarniak

Craig Melvin Breaks Silence on ‘Today’ Show Intruder Arrest

Craig Melvin talks for a living, but he forgot his words for a second when he met his future wife, Lindsay Czarniak.

The Today co-anchor knew who Czarniak was when he joined Washington, D.C.'s NBC affiliate WRC-TV in 2008, where she already worked as a sportscaster, but she had been in Beijing covering the Olympics when Melvin started at the station. One night they were coming back from commercial and he was expecting to see the guy who'd been filling in for her, but she was there instead.

"I'm like, 'Oh, hey, uh,' and so I got a little tongue-tied," Melvin recalled to Today host Jenna Bush-Hager in November. "I was like, 'Hey, welcome back from the Olympics,' and she's like, 'Welcome to Channel 4, loser.'"

But, he quickly clarified, "She didn't say 'loser.'"

And because they were in the middle of a broadcast, cameras were rolling the whole time.

But the 47-year-old showed no network favoritism when he shared on Instagram Aug. 9 that Czarniak would be starting a new gig as a host for streamer CBS Sports HQ.

"Stoked. Happy. Proud," Melvin wrote. 

And that's how it's been since the former colleagues decided to take a shot at love, the spouses of almost 15 years remaining each other's biggest fan—as well as teammates in parenting son Delano, 12, and daughter Sybil, 9.

And his wife remains his "favorite broadcaster on the planet," he said in introducing her on the July 29 episode of his Glass Half Full podcast. So, he quipped, "I think you'll enjoy the conversation, edited heavily."

Czarniak, meanwhile, told him that she almost wore the red button-down shirt from J.Crew "that I saved in the closet because it's what I was wearing the night I met you on set."

He asked why she didn't wear it and the Game Day Murders host offered to go get it. To which Melvin cracked, "Don't do that, because now it's weird."

But he remembered the outfit from what he considers a bygone era.

So, she agreed to have drinks in July 2009 and, Czarniak shared, "there was something that clicked. And it was wasn’t necessarily that I knew, ‘I have to be with this guy.’ But it was like, ‘I don’t want to be with anyone else that I’d hung out with.'"

Once they finally went on their first real date in October 2009, it was full speed ahead, Czarniak noting, "We just wanted to hang out all the time."

They moved to Westport, Conn., to be between their respective jobs at NBC News in New York and ESPN in Bristol, with Melvin telling the New York Times in 2025, "Kind of the only thing we cared about was that our commutes were similar in each other’s in length and that we were near a train station."

He and Czarniak tied the knot Oct. 15 at Church of the Holy City in D.C. in front of about 200 guests, including former WRC colleagues who always suspected they were secretly dating.

Delano was born in March 2014 and Sybil followed in November 2016—and the family upgraded in 2021 to a six-bedroom colonial in Westport.

Their basement, where they installed a bar, restaurant-style booth and massive TV, is their "favorite space" in the house, Melvin told the Times.  “When I’m not traveling and Lindsay’s not traveling this is where we all have dinner on Sunday. A booth forces you to be close.”

Though it's not as if he and Czarniak need much help in that department.

Marking 14 years of marriage last October, she captioned a fall-themed snap of the couple, "I do indeed love you more than when we made it official and feel like the luckiest girl in the pumpkin patch to have you by my side."

See more sweet pics of all the Today talent and their families: