Ample evidence suggests that the evolution of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies is connected, but the physical processes driving this link remain unclear. The role of galaxy mergers in triggering black hole growth and in creating the empirical black hole/galaxy bulge correlations is a matter of particularly active debate. Galaxy mergers are of additional interest as the precursors of supermassive black hole binaries, which may merge and produce powerful gravitational waves. This gravitational wave emission can also eject the merged black hole from its host nucleus, leaving the galaxy without a central black hole and producing an offset (‘recoiling’) quasar. There has been rapid recent progress from both theory and observations in constraining the merger/AGN connection and identifying signatures of active black hole pairs. I will review these findings and discuss ongoing work to address remaining open questions. I will also describe the handful of candidate recoiling black holes discovered to date, as well as results from numerical models that indicate promising avenues for identifying a population of such objects in current and future wide-field surveys.