Nick and Vanessa Lachey Say There's No Perfect Person—Just Your Person (2025)

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Even after 13 years of marriage, Nick and Vanessa Lachey are quick to admit that their relationship isn’t easy. But to them, that’s also the secret to a successful partnership. “Anything that’s worth having takes work,” Nick says. “To me, that’s a cornerstone of life, and marriage is no different. There’s no shame in that.” In many ways, it’s this sentiment that also makes them the ideal hosts for two of Netflix’s most popular dating shows, Love Is Blind and The Ultimatum. “It’s always been somewhat therapeutic for us to be a part of this and take a look at our own marriage and our own relationship as we go through each season,” Nick says. Rather than present their relationship as the gold standard, the Lacheys aren’t afraid to say that their dynamic has its own flaws and challenges. It’s a vulnerability that allows them to successfully help the participants on both programs navigate these social experiments.

In Love Is Blind, which premiered in February 2020 and will drop the first episodes of its latest season on February 14, 2025, singles from a selected city go on a series of blind dates in “the pods.” After just 10 days of dating, some pairs choose to get engaged—without ever seeing the other person. From there, they have just weeks to plan a wedding. During this time, they move in together, meet each other’s families, and see whether or not marriage is in the cards for them. Nick and Vanessa are there to guide them through the process. After filming eight seasons of the show, the duo understands what allows a couple to work—and what frequently contributes to fallouts.

During the show’s first season, there was a one-and-a-half-year period between filming and release. “We shot November 2018, and it aired February 2020,” Vanessa says. As a result, the engaged couples were able to keep their relationships out of the public eye for 16 months. “No noise, no outside social media,” Vanessa adds. “I do believe that’s a huge reason why they’re one of our most successful seasons, season one, also because nobody knew what it was. Whenever we have a season that shoots and airs quickly, we have a lot of issues because people haven’t had the opportunity to build the foundation.”

The couple’s own time in the spotlight allows them to relate to what contestants are going through. With over two million Instagram followers between the two of them, Nick, the lead singer of 98 Degrees, and Vanessa, who starred in NCIS: Hawaiʻi, understand what it’s like to have the public constantly commenting on your relationship, particularly on social media platforms. “We have 19 years under our belt, and it’s still a challenge for us to navigate as human beings,” Vanessa says. When the Lacheys speak to couples on their shows, they often suggest taking advantage of this time—before they’re in the public eye—to work through any insecurities or past blunders. While no couple is immune to arguments or tense moments, the ones who have a healthy foundation are ultimately the most successful. It’s an ethos Nick and Vanessa adhere to in their own dynamic.

Their ongoing commitment to authentic connection can be traced all the way back to the start of their marriage. When the two wed in 2011, rather than hosting a grand affair with hundreds of people, they opted to invite just 30 of their closest friends and family members to watch them say “I do” in an intimate ceremony—destination weddings may be commonplace now, but it was a more modern approach to tying the knot at the time. The multi-day celebration, held on Sir Richard Branson’s Necker Island, was also representative of their relationship history. “I was living in New York, and he was living in L.A., and we originally started dating by just seeing each other somewhere,” Vanessa says. “It wasn’t his home base. It wasn’t my home base.” Instead, the two would travel to a “neutral site.” On one of these trips to the Caribbean, the two passed Necker Island and asked if anyone had gotten married there. “We just kind of looked at each other, and he hadn’t proposed to me yet, but it was like we knew if and when we got married, that’s where it was going to be,” Vanessa remembers. “When he did propose, that’s why it was so quick for us. It was within six months.”

Their wedding destination is a special spot for them and their children. The duo’s 10-year-old daughter recently told Vanessa that she wants to wear her mother’s dress and get married on Necker Island—just like her parents did—when it’s her turn to walk down the aisle. And while the two don’t have plans for an elaborate vow renewal ceremony, they see the merit in having their kids witness them confirm their commitment to one another through such a ritual. “I think it would be really beautiful,” Vanessa says.

Ultimately, they don’t need the grand gesture of a vow renewal to reiterate their commitment to each other; instead, they put in the necessary work and effort each day. Currently, the two say they’re in a transitional period in their marriage. In the past, they would have one date night a week—a time to catch up on life and reconnect. Now, they see the need for two moments a week: one to tackle logistics and another to prioritize their romantic and physical relationship. The idea for the latter came from their friends in Hawaii, Vanessa says, who told her that Thursday was their day for intimacy. She then floated the idea to Nick. “He’s like, ‘What, schedule a sex day?’” Vanessa laughs. “It sounds weird when you say that, so we decided: Wednesday—hump day.” While the two have let the tradition slip since moving back to L.A., they still see the need for reserving that time for their marriage. “I don’t want the time that we have for intimacy and connection to be taken over by logistics, but that’s our life,” Vanessa adds. “I think we’re coming into an age of having to have a hump day and a logistics day.” Nick has a different classification for the schedule: “Happy hump day and calendar dump day.”

While the Lacheys encounter many of the same challenges other couples with children face, they also have one that’s unique to the two of them: working together. Rather than seeing the filming and promotional schedule as more obligations to check off of their list, the two choose to savor those moments. “It’s a break from what we’re doing any other day,” Nick says. “We have to go to New York?” Vanessa chimes in: “And get hair and makeup? And get a hotel? And get a flight?” “Sounds alright,” Nick jokes. “We’ll justify a New York trip.” While the two appreciate these opportunities, they say it takes effort to separate the stressors in their lives—leaving work problems at work and home problems at home is something that requires practice. “When you’re a couple, that’s obviously a little tricker,” Nick says. And yet, in their roles as hosts, the Lacheys adhere to this separation while also authentically sharing the hurdles they encounter in their own marriage with contestants. It’s a sense of healthy messiness Love Is Blind and The Ultimatum both embrace.

Many of the Love Is Blind contestants are hopeless romantics, Vanessa says, frustrated and burnt out by the modern dating scene. On a standard first date, the critical questions are often considered to be off the table. (Most people would balk at being asked if they wanted kids, had debt, or harbored deep religious beliefs in the first minutes after meeting someone.) But that’s not the case on Love Is Blind. “Within their first five questions, they’re talking about kids and family and their future, and that, to them, is so refreshing,” Vanessa says. “There’s no BS. There’s no small talk—all that comes organically and naturally—but they get to the core of the things that they’re dying to do in the real world.”

While the structure of the show—proposing, going on a honeymoon, meeting the parents, and getting married in a matter of weeks—may be unorthodox, but it expedites the inevitable. Rather than waiting months or years to see if something may work out with a potential partner, a pair is quickly forced to confront those tough questions and situations. “At some point, you are going to have to wake up next to that person and see their living habits and their nighttime routine and their morning routine and how they are with finances,” Vanessa says. By design, the show simply reveals them earlier.

Like many fans of Love Is Blind, Nick and Vanessa save the episodes to watch together. (Netflix and chill, anyone?) And in their years of witnessing singles fall in and out of love, they’ve noticed the core tenets that are key to making a dynamic successful: communication, trust, and respect. “The couples who make it, or even the couples that don’t make it but find themselves, is because they all communicated through it,” Vanessa says. It’s the second two that ensure a dynamic is built for the long haul. “You can trust that your partner is going to be there to make you feel safe at the end of an argument, or with the respect, you know that you’re not going to jump to conclusions,” she adds. “You’re going to hear them out.”

However, in the world of modern dating, it’s difficult to hold onto some of these values. Rather than stay the course, many people are quick to bow out. In watching the show, it’s something viewers can instantly recognize: Relationships are tough. Nick notes that many singles today are quick to judge and seek out instant gratification rather than committing to working through something. And when you try to have a relationship under such terms, it’s difficult. Unlike a dating app where you can instantly unmatch with someone or a texting-based dynamic where you can ghost a potential partner, Love Is Blind doesn’t allow participants to run from conflict. “People are forced to figure out a way to communicate through it, and then also navigate their own emotions through it,” Vanessa says. It also pushes singles to let go of the dream of finding someone without any flaws. “There’s no perfect person,” Nick says. “There’s just your person.”

In many ways, the Lacheys speak from personal experience on their shows. In season one of The Ultimatum, Vanessa shared with participants that she had once given Nick an ultimatum. “We dated for five years,” she said on the show. “I finally said, ‘What are we doing?’” The question came after she had moved in with Nick—and even renovated his bachelor pad. “If I’m being completely candid and transparent, we took a break,” she told the couples. “We both saw one other person, and we realized that if we got out of our own way, we could be amazing together.” However, for Vanessa, it took seeing someone else to realize that Nick was in fact the right person for her. In the show, Nick nods alongside his wife. “I think we got perspective,” he said.

Today, almost three years after that televised admission, the couple continues to be proactive about their relationship with the help of a marriage therapist. “It’s really important to have a third-person perspective that’s an unbiased opinion,” Vanessa says. As self-identified strong-willed people, the Lacheys say they can be quick to jump on the attack when the other does something wrong; inserting a neutral party into those conversations, they say, can dispel some of that conflict. This vulnerability is often refreshing to particiants on both shows. “It’s nice for them to see that, yes, we’ve been together 19 years, married for 13, and we are seeing a therapist, and we still have problems,” Vanessa says. They strive to be honest with contestants about the ups and downs of their marriage, disclosing to them fights that they’ve had and how they’ve worked through them. It’s infusing the reality of a marriage into a reality show. They’re adept at addressing marital conflicts in a way that feels relatable and reassuring, giving couples both on the show and at home an authentic snippet of what the future could look like.

When asked if the two of them would have picked each other as singles on Love Is Blind, they’re both in agreement: “We always say yes, and I think we would have,” Nick says. The confidence in their response is due to the history of their relationship. While they knew what one another looked like, they essentially lived their own version of the show in their first few months of dating. “We spent a lot of time on opposite coasts,” Nick says. “We spent a lot of time on the phone, really digging into the issues that were important to us, and digging into what made each other tick, and getting to know each other on a very organic level.” Ultimately, those initial stages served as the foundation the two needed for their marriage, one that continues to be rooted in the same values they see in the Love Is Blind couples that stay together: communication, trust, and respect.