Ravi Patel: Pursuit Of Happiness — Meet His Wife, Mahaley Patel
She is a sleep whisperer for babies.
Kathy Hutchins / Shutterstock You might know actor and director Ravi Patel from his appearance on Aziz Ansari's Master of None. Or maybe you saw is documentary Meet The Patels about his family and their attempts to marry him off. Now he has a new project coming out on HBO Max and it features his wife Mahaley Patel. Ravi Patel's Pursuit of Happiness premiers on HBO Max today.
The couple has been married for four years and they are parents to a three-year-old daughter. While he works on documentary films exploring how different cultures live, Mahaley Patel is working on one fo the things dearest to the hearts of parents everywhere: helping babies and toddlers sleep.
Who is Ravi Patel's wife, Mahaley Patel?
Who is Mahaley Patel?
Like her husband, Mahaley Patel has been in show business for many years. She moved to Los Angeles for the second have of her college career and started pursing work as an actress. She appeared in movies like Easy A and The DUFF before changing career paths to pursue a degree in clinical psychology. Her specialty is Marriage and Family Counseling and she also works as a pediatric sleep consultant.
When did Ravi and Mahaley get married?
The couple met in about 2014 and got married the following year. She had been hoping to start graduate school right after the wedding but life had other plans. She discovered she was pregnant with their daughter and they decided that she would spend a year at home after the baby was born.
Ravi and Maheley with their daughter Amelie.
What does Mahaley Patel do for a living?
Anyone who has ever had a newborn knows that sleep is a precious commodity for parents and babies alike. When the family isn't getting the sleep they need, everyone is miserable. That was what happened to the Patels after their daughter was born and they struggled to find a way to get everyone rested. Patel finally hired a sleep consultant to work out the issue and discovered that not only did she love having a baby who sleeps, she loves being a person others can turn to for help with baby sleep. After friends started asking her to tips, she went ahead and became a sleep consultant.
What ethnicity is Mahaley Patel?
In 2015, Ravi Patel and his sister released a heartfelt documentary called Meet The Patels about their parents' desire for him to have an arranged marriage with an Indian woman. The movies talked about Patel caste in India (it's not just a last name — it's a signifier of being part of a caste of people generally considered ambitious and entrepreneurial), the community of Patel immigrants, and what it means to straddle different worlds of tradition when it comes to love and marriage.
Despite his parents' attempts to pair him off with a woman with a similar background, that's not what happened for him at all. Mahaley Hassem Patel grew up in Atlanta, though her father is originally from Afghanistan. They met in Los Angeles.
You'll get to see Mahaley Patelin her husband's new project, Ravi Patel: Pursuit of Happiness.
Ravi Patel has a new docuseries debuting on HBO Max. The Pursuit of Happiness is a four-part series that looks at "local traditions and engage[s] in provocative conversations about parenting, work, immigration, and growing old" in Japan, Mexico, Denmark, and South Korea. In a social media post praising her husband's project, Patel let slip that she is part of the episode on Japan, calling the experience of filming there the trip of a lifetime.
The Patels in Japan.
Her next step will be her psychology practice.
Patel recently finished her training to become a marriage and family therapist and she hopes to establish a practice working with trauma survivors as well as helping people with postpartum depression.
She believes women can do anything.
As a mom and a psychologist, Patel knows first hand what kind of mental strength women have. She says her experience has made her more sure than ever that women can and should be doing anything they want. "Motherhood has made me realize that there is no task too challenging for a woman," she has said. "I think we need women in every type of role. We need women in leadership roles, in community service roles, in schools, in offices, in hospitals… we need women everywhere."
Rebekah Kuschmider has been writing about celebrities, pop culture, entertainment, and politics since 2010. She is the creator of the blog FeminXer and she is a cohost of the weekly podcast The More Perfect Union.