Justin Hartley Jokes About Reason He Knew He Had to Marry Sofia Pernas: ‘Will Work It Out From There’

Justin Hartley only needed to know one thing about wife Sofia Pernas to realize he wanted to marry her.

During the Thursday, July 16, episode of the “I Am an Actor” podcast, Hartley, 49, played a game where he matched specific superlatives with former costars. He was asked which of his select coworkers were the “cleanest” — and Hartley chose Pernas, 36.

“She is very clean,” he said before cohosts Jon Brockett and Jamie Chung noted that he was aware of how organized Pernas was “intimately.”

Hartley recalled immediately knowing Pernas was The One for him.

“I was like, ‘Marry me,’” he added. “‘You are clean too? Marry me and we will work it out from there. It’ll be fine. Everything else will be fine.’”

Hartley and Pernas first worked together in 2015 on The Young and The Restless. Years later, they reconnected away from the cameras and exchanged vows in 2021.

“People write songs about [this kind of love]. People talk about it and I think you want to believe that everyone has that in their life,” Hartley shared on a May episode of Tommy DiDario‘s “I’ve Never Said This Before” podcast. “You want to believe that everyone gets to a point where they meet their soulmate or whatever you want to call it. It’s unfortunate that I think a lot of people don’t. That’s sad.”

Hartley pointed out how he has made it a priority to appreciate Pernas, saying, “When you do have it, you got to just hold on to it. It’s so special and fragile and in some ways rare, unfortunately. She’s everything and she’s fantastic.”

The Tracker star also shared the lessons he learned that he took into his marriage.

“I heard this from my stepdad where he said to me a long time ago, ‘You got to take care of your relationship and be very protective of who you surround yourself with and what relationships you surround yourself with,’” he explained.

“Because there will be people that are in your life right now that you think are your friends and they simply cannot handle your relationship. They can’t handle it,” Hartley continued. “It’s not necessarily sad but it is just true that when you have a relationship that you really care about [and] it could be a friendship, it could be with your mom or your dad or it could be with your dog.”

He added: “Any relationship that you have with yourself, there are going to be people that you have to be careful with.”

Hartley clarified that the problem wasn’t always that about a loved one “trying to sabotage” a situation or relationship.

“They’re not bad people,” he said. “They just can’t handle it. And you don’t need to be hearing things like that. I’m not saying that you should be surrounded by sycophants and that’s healthy. But there’s certainly a difference between someone rooting for your love and rooting for your relationship vs. something who is jealous of what you have.”