Kirsten Vangsness: “Criminal Minds” Star Penelope Garcia is Engaged

Kirsten Vangsness, best known for her role as the computer wiz Penelope Garcia on the hit CBS crime drama Criminal Minds, is engaged. So who is the lucky husband-to-be? He is actor and writer Keith Ha...
Kirsten Vangsness: “Criminal Minds” Star Penelope Garcia is Engaged
Written by Kimberly Ripley
  • Kirsten Vangsness, best known for her role as the computer wiz Penelope Garcia on the hit CBS crime drama Criminal Minds, is engaged.

    So who is the lucky husband-to-be?

    He is actor and writer Keith Hanson.

    “He’s the perfect partner for me and I feel like we evolve,” Kirsten Vangsness tells People magazine. “When you’re so into somebody and you get to just mush up next to them – that’s the best part of it.”

    It was a couple of weeks ago that Keith Hanson proposed to Kirsten Vangsness. She is already comparing the act of planning a wedding to producing plays–something she does in addition to her role on Criminal Minds.

    “He’s more particular than I am, which is going to be fine, but he has many more requirements than I do,” Vangsness says of her fiance. “It might take a little while longer, but it’s a quality problem.”

    Kirsten Vangsness has some very unique ideas when it comes to planning her wedding.

    “The only thing I know I think I want is that I want to spray paint dinosaurs gold and use them as table markers, so that you could be like, ‘you’re at stegosaurus,’ but I might try to merge all my favorite things, so it would be like a Harry Potter/Chronicles of Narnia/dinosaurs/Doctor Who wedding,” she jokes. “I asked [Keith] what he thought about getting a horse and putting a horn on it and everyone could take pictures with a unicorn.”

    Her wedding dress is even more creative.

    “I want a plaid dress that’s so cool I could wear it to something else,” Kirsten Vangsness explains. “I want to wear my wedding dress and then when I get nominated for my first big award I want to wear that, so people could be like, ‘she wore her wedding dress!'”

    This isn’t the first time Kirsten Vangsness has been engaged. In 2009, she became engaged to Melanie Goldstein after the two dated for two and a half years.

    “I was so in love with her, but in terms of life growth, what we were both doing separately was just pulling us apart, not sexually, but in all other ways in terms of what your dreams are and what you want to go after and all that,” she says. “Growth takes people in weird paths and all of the sudden our relationship wasn’t able to sustain what I wanted to do and in terms of what she wanted to do, so we kind of had to call it.”

    Despite now having been engaged to people of both sexes, Kirsten Vangsness says she doesn’t identify as bisexual.

    “I guess I never understood the term of being bisexual because once I let myself come out ten or 12 years ago, I was like, ‘Oh, okay I’m gay,’ and I was perfectly okay with that, but then I was like, ‘Wait, nothing changed in me,’ ” says Vangsness. “I don’t feel any different.”

    “The person I’m with, I can tell you, is very, very special and the right person for me. I was not expecting it to be a guy, but everyone has his or her own intricate stories. If I were straight, I would say I was, but I don’t totally understand it myself. I don’t want to have an answer to something that I don’t really have an answer to,” she adds.

    Provided Kirsten Vangsness and Keith Hanson love and respect one another, no one need be concerned with anything more.

    Congratulations to Kirsten Vangsness and Keith Hanson are definitely in store.

    Do you suppose the very handsome Shamar Williams will get a wedding invite, so he can watch his “baby girl” costar tie the knot?

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