You may think motherhood content creator Alexandra Cunningham (also known as @thisfamilytree) drew in her over 400,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok with the kind of aspirational videos that incite envy. But from the beginning, the Toronto influencer’s approach was the opposite: she wanted to create totally relatable videos that reflect the truth of parenting. Whether it’s joking about the perils of the holidays with young kids or poking fun at the judgment that mothers face, Cunningham has done just that. She and her frequent collaborator and manager, husband Shane Cunningham, shared the story of how fate brought them together and their whirlwind romance.
How they met
Alexandra: I got asked to do a music video for our friends’ band, The Arkells, because they didn’t have a budget, so they were trying to get people they knew. I didn’t know that Shane was doing the casting. I don’t remember much from that day. But five years later, Shane and my cousin matched on Tinder, and my cousin had met the love her life the night before and she said she didn’t want to waste this guy and told me to go on the date instead.
Shane: She goes, I’m going to cancel our date, but I have someone better for you! I wasn’t so sure about being set up on a blind date over Tinder — Tinder is enough of a risk as it is. Then she said, “You know her.” And I was like, “Well everyone I know, I’m not interested in, so no thanks.” And she sent me a picture of Alex, and I was like, “Oh hell yes, it’s her!” I didn’t even think it was a possibility that it would be this actress I had met five years before.
Alex doesn’t know this either, but I found her ID two years after that on the ground in a bar, and I messaged her on Facebook, and she goes, “Oh, I’m just backpacking through Europe,” or something like that, and said to just leave it at the bar. She didn’t even remember it was me, the guy who directed her, she thought I was just some random person!
The first date
Alex: So Shane messaged me that this all went down, and I had been pre drinking with some girlfriends who were going out that night. And then Shane told me, “I want to strike while the iron is lukewarm and go out, like, right now.” I was feeling pretty good, so I agreed. We met up at one of our favourite local neighbourhood bars called Gallagher’s in Hamilton, and I was nervous and excited because I had just gotten out of a relationship a few months before. Shane told me he was going to be the guy at the bar with eyeliner on. I didn’t know if he was joking or not but I thought it was funny!
Shane: She was wearing a little belly top and she just had a $20 bill in her hand. And I’m like, that’s a weird move, because she wanted to show that she could pay. I didn’t realize that was the only $20 she had to her name. She was going to Portugal the next week, and all of her money was for that trip. So she’s like, I’m going to buy the first drink, and then I guess he’ll just have to buy the rest, to show that I’m independent enough. It worked! She knew every single person at the bar; she barely talked to me, to be honest. People kept talking to her, and then people would walk by and she would have a 20-minute conversation with every single person. I was just thinking, this is not going to work, she doesn’t care about me. And then at the end of the night, another person walked by, and she was like, after party at my place! And I thought, am I even invited? It doesn’t seem like she likes me that much. But then the after party fell apart with everyone else except for me.
Alex: Intentionally.
The proposal
Alex: The dating phase only lasted about six months, and then we got engaged, so we were fast and furious, but that whole time was kind of like a whirlwind. And honestly, we were still getting to know each other. We just knew we wanted to be together. The proposal itself was my birthday celebration. We were at the Drake Devonshire in Prince Edward County, and we were just having a really great night, and we drank a lot of wine, a little too much wine.
Shane: Alex popped this cork, and it bounced all across the room and went right in this metal garbage. And we were like, wow, this is a magical moment, the odds of that happening are one in a million, right? And then we started drinking, and we looked at each other and we were like, we should get married.
We woke up kind of hung over, and Alex is like, oh, what a wild night. And I’m like, indeed. We don’t even know if we both really proposed to each other. Then we asked each other, do you want to get married? And then before I knew it, we were doing a Facebook invite to all of our friends. We just recorded a quick impromptu video and sent it to all of our friends.
The wedding
Alex: We ended up getting married about a year after our first date. We got married in the backyard of my parents’ house, and it’s the house that we now live in. It’s right on the escarpment, so it overlooks the entire city of Hamilton. We were like, let’s just get married now, because I hate planning things, I’m very disorganized, and I’ll put in as much effort if we get married tomorrow as if we do right now. So I wore my mom’s dress, and we had a big barbecue from this barbecue vendor, and it was just such a homegrown fun celebration. It was perfect.
The honeymoon
Shane: We went to Saint Martin and stayed in this Airbnb that had this nice infinity pool. And this very strange woman was living in the Airbnb above us, and she was just obsessed with Alex and doing photoshoots with us. She got us to kiss on camera. She told us we could stay there for free afterwards! We found out the woman herself was going through a divorce, so she was really loving new love. It was pretty memorable; there was a power outage, and we were so hot in the middle of the night and just woke up sweating because there was no air conditioning, so we would just hop in the pool. We had this nice, magical kind of new love, newlywed time.
The kids
Alex: We have two daughters, an almost 8-year-old named Lucy — she was born on Shane’s birthday. And Betty is our six-year-old.
Shared hobbies and interests
Alex: I think most of what we do is shared, and we’ve talked about this before. I don’t know that it’s healthy for every set of people, but we’re codependent in a lot of ways, and neither one of us really minds. We started off early in our relationship playing a lot of basketball together. Now, our shared interest is that we take part in each other’s work a lot. I’m a content creator, and Shane’s my manager, but then we also have a lot of fun doing videos together. He’s doing a show right now and I’m helping him out as his assistant on his show, which is a blast for me, just to be able to see him at work and everything. And I just think we just like having fun. We’re both people who just seek out a good time, with our kids, or with two of us.
The secret to success
Alex: Putting our relationship first before so many things, including sometimes parenthood, in the sense that we want to make sure our partner is okay and that our relationship is okay, because it makes us better parents when we do that.
Shane: There’s obviously the saying, treat people the way you want to be treated. I think it’s different when you’re in a relationship. I think it’s more, treat people the way they want to be treated.
The future together
Shane: We’re such simple people, we don’t need a lot, but I think we just want to feel comfortable, and that is our goal. We want we don’t need to be kazillionaires, but we want to be comfortable. We want to be on track. I don’t want our kids to worry. And I think comfort, to me, is just a comforting thought.
Alex: For me, and I tell Shane this all the time, it’s old people on the front porch having a coffee — that’s our end goal.
