Rachel Accurso, a.k.a. Ms. Rachel, has built an empire out of caring for children, so is it any wonder that passion also led her to meeting the love of her life?
According to the 2025 Glamour Woman of the Year, she met her now husband, Aron Accurso, while searching for a Unitarian church in New York City. At the time, Rachel—who now holds master’s degrees in early childhood education and music education—was “looking for something deeper with my religion” and decided to check out one with a preschool attached in case there might be an opportunity to work with the kids.
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“I went to coffee hour, and the young adult people came over…and someone said, ‘Do you want to meet the best musician in the world?’” she tells Glamour editor-in-chief Samantha Barry. “And I was like, Oh my gosh, the best musician in the world is here? Definitely, because I’m a musician. And then it was like, ‘This is Aron.’”
Ms. Rachel says they’ve been together ever since that first meeting in 2010. The pair married in 2016 and have since welcomed two children: son Thomas, born in 2018, and daughter Susannah, whom they welcomed via surrogacy in April 2025.
The content creators were first inspired to make YouTube videos in 2019 by their son, who’d been experiencing a speech delay. “It makes me teary thinking of the time when he couldn’t communicate—you could see the frustration,” Rachel told People in January. “Watching your child struggle is the worst feeling, but when parents say our videos help with communication, it’s huge. Communication is a right. And it’s exciting for me to take what I’ve learned and pass it on.”
By now Ms. Rachel has amassed 12 billion YouTube views, 16 million subscribers, 9 books, a line of toys, and the most-watched kids program of the year on Netflix—and she says she couldn’t have done it without her partner. “There’s no Ms. Rachel without Mr. Aron,” she wrote in an Instagram post back in 2024.
To think Aron had almost left church that day without meeting his now wife. “He said he was hanging up his name tag to leave, and then he saw my smile,” she tells Glamour. “We walked out together and we went for a walk. He said, ‘I’ll walk you out.’ And I was like, I like this guy. He knows what he wants to do. And then he walked me out and we’ve been together since.”
“That was 15 years ago,” she adds. “It was instant.”
To read Ms. Rachel’s full Glamour Woman of the Year cover interview, click here. To read about the rest of the honorees, click here.