Hilary Duff and Nicole Richie are proving that you can not only be cordial with your ex-boyfriend, but you can even do date nights with each other. This weekend Duff and her husband Matthew Koma joined her ex-boyfriend Joel Madden and Richie for a quadruple date with Pete Wentz and his girlfriend, Meagan Camper, and producer Josh Abraham and his wife Regina. The Pulse music group founder shared the pic to his Instagram Story with the words “Date Night.”
Not only have Richie and Duff at some point had the same taste in men, but they also hit the exact same pose in the photo. Fans who remember their past relationship started talking about the date night on Twitter. “The world is finally healing!! Hilary Duff is now friends with Nicole Richie and Joel Madden?” One user wrote.
Duff and Madden dated in 2004 and spit in 2006. Duff was 16 years old when they began dating and the Good Charlotte singer was 25. The age gap is another topic of conversation that has been brought up on Twitter.
Madden began dating Richie in 2006 after his split with Duff. He told PEOPLE at the time, “Every girl I’ve ever dated I have respect for, and I always try to leave them on good terms.” “I don’t see the necessity to be friends with anyone you’ve dated but definitely out of respect of the time, you have to be kind of respectful and that’s what I try to do,” he continued.
Following the split, Duff told Seventeen magazine, “All of the going out he did after we broke up sort of shocked me. Like, that’s just so out of character for him, and when we were together, he hated stuff like that, so I felt like I didn’t really know him as well as I thought I did.”
However Duff remained hopeful and eventually got everything she wanted. “I still want the cookie-cutter American dream–to get married, have kids, and have a house with a picket fence. I still believe that marriage can work,” she said at the time, per Hollywood. Duff and Koma are also happy parents to Banks, 3, and Mae, 10 months. She is also the mother to Luca,9, from her past relationship with Mike Comrie.
Madden and Richie married in 2010 and are the parents of Sparrow, 12, and Harlow, 14.