Absence makes the heart beat faster… or not.
At the end of the ordeal, they must decide if they’re ready to get back together with their original partner… or if they felt spark with someone else and want to move on.Not surprisingly, the show was created by the same geniuses behind Love Is Blind and, like this series, is hosted by Nick and Vanessa Lachey.
“It was weird, it was a very unique experience,” Lauren Pounds, 30, a bartender from Austin, Texas (like everyone on the show), told The Post about her participation on the show. “After two and a half years in a relationship, it’s an awkward thing to be thrown back into the dating pool. It’s so unnatural. You go [on the show] in a committed relationship and they break up with you and speed date you. And you see yourself visibly on a date with someone else. And then you get separated from them and you’re not allowed to talk, and then you have to move in with a stranger… it’s absolutely insane.”
“The Ultimatum” features the couple Lauren and Nate (left) and the other couple Hunter and Alexis (right).
Nick and Vanessa Lachey are the hosts of The Ultimatum.ILANA PANICH-LINSMAN/NETFLIX
Lauren took part in “The Ultimatum” with Nate, her boyfriend who she’s known in some ways for more than a decade. Nate wants children, but Lauren tends towards a childless life.
“It wasn’t a hard no or a hard yes, it was just something I felt like I needed to explore a little bit more,” she said. “So as I moved on, I had a thought that somehow, miraculously, I was going to find this out with someone else. I wanted to marry him and he wanted to marry me and it was just the kids thing that was so frustrating because everything else in our relationship was very good.”
However, Lauren didn’t enjoy watching Nate date other girls on the show, and she even ended a few days crying in the shower.
Zay (left) and Rae, another couple in The Ultimatum.
Randall (left) and Shanique, another couple in The Ultimatum.
“As the dates were arranged, I sat and chatted with another guy whose girlfriend was just a few feet away talking to Nathan. So I got very emotional… and I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is awful. This is unnatural, you should not see your partner on a date with someone whose partner you are also dating. It was really messy. I was like, ‘Where have I taken us?’”
Spoiler alert – Lauren and Nate left the show early, pulling the plug on the whole endeavor. “I think when I was with other people, I realized, ‘Oh my god, I don’t want to be in that scene again,'” she said. “The whole time I was comparing everything to Nathan and I was like, ‘I have a good person, I really don’t want to go through that again, I don’t want to be single.’ And I found my person, I just have to work with him specifically on my problems and not concentrate on other people.”
April Marie, 24, and a corporate recruiter, got on the show because her boyfriend of two years, Jake Cunningham, 26, was dragging his feet when it came time to settle down.
She said it was a “fun experience” dating other people.
“I’m a social person, and it opened my shell back up to that flirtatious butterfly feeling. It was fun to see, ‘It would be like this without Jake,'” she said.
Jake (left) and April set out on The Ultimatum to find common ground.
But it also hurt April to see Jake single and mingling.
“In the back of my mind at the time of filming, seeing Jake having fun was definitely unfortunate. So it has been a very awkward three weeks of dating [someone else], and tried to reach Jake and talk to him, but we couldn’t agree. It felt a bit traumatizing, like, ‘What have I done?'”
But during the three weeks that April spent with another guy on the show, she was able to find clarity.
The Ultimatum boys Randall, Hunter and Zay toast their new single lives. JODY DOMINGUE/NETFLIX
“That experience was the time of my life,” she said. “Meeting [the other guy], we did something every day, and every night it was something new. I thought, ‘This is what a relationship should feel like. A relationship should be adventurous.’ That was my souvenir. “I want that feeling now, and I want that feeling after I leave the show.” So the relationship [with the other guy] it was mostly about finding myself.”
In the end, she said, she’s grateful she was a part of The Ultimatum.
“Those were the hardest three months of my life,” she says. “But sometimes it takes a hard lesson to learn what you need.”