Can you have it all?

Women, particularly successful women, get asked that question all the time. Men, on the other hand, rarely do - a point which Jennifer Garner famously underlined in 2014, when she revealed that she’s constantly asked about how she manages to balance having a job and a family.

“[Me and my (now ex) husband, Ben Affleck], got home at night and we compared notes,” she said. “And I told him every single person who interviewed me, I mean every single one… asked me, ‘How do you balance work and family?’ and he said the only thing that people asked him repeatedly was about the tits on the Blurred Lines girl [Ben’s co-star in Gone Girl, Emily Ratajkowski].

“As for work-life balance, he said no-one asked him about it that day. As a matter of fact, no-one had ever asked him about it. And we do share the same family. Isn’t it time to kinda change that conversation?”

Thankfully, it seems as if that conversation is changing. And Ryan Reynolds, who shares two daughters with his wife, Blake Lively, was pleasantly surprised to be asked about his family, a rarity for men in his position.

Read more: Can we really have it all? Famous women speak out on the topic of work-life balance

Appearing alongside the cast of Deadpool 2 on Monday at BUILD, an audience member wanted to know from the 41-year-old, “How do you find that balance between coming home, being with the kids, and still being 100% at work?”

Visibly touched by the question, Reynolds replied: “That’s so nice when you ask a dude this.”

He continued: “For me, it’s really about prioritising. We’re lucky enough – and this is an obscene luxury – that we can avoid sort of saying, ‘OK, well, Blake you’re gonna go to shoot a movie in Thailand, while I’m shooting this movie in Vancouver.’ We sort of trade off.”

Reynolds added that, in fact, after the Deadpool 2 promotional tour, he’s off to her set and will “just watch the kids and be with the kids. I never want to be on my deathbed, and look back and just go, ‘Oh, I missed out.’ I love being with my kids.”

Of course, Reynolds has long made a point of challenging stereotypes. He famously banned the word “bossy” from his home, in a bid to protect his daughters from gender stereotyping, and recently admitted that he loves being known as “Mr Blake Lively”.

After being asked about the moniker – which was given to him by none other than Diane Keaton herself – he told Entertainment Tonight: “Oh, I’m Mr Lively 24/7. And I’m happy about it.

“It’s great. It’s the best gig in the world.”

This is partly due to the couple’s shared sense of humour (they’re constantly trolling one another on social media) – but it’s also down to the fact that they treat one another with respect and empathy.

“We were friends for two years before we were ever dating,” Lively said, when asked about the dynamics of her marriage with Reynolds. “And I treat him like my girlfriend. He does the same for me. He treats me like his best buddy.”

Reynolds too, has a lot of sweet things to say about his wife.

“She meets hate with empathy,” he said recently. “She’ll take the time to imagine what happened to a person when they were five or six years old. And she’s made me a more empathetic person.”

Image: Getty