Red rose bouquets for all! Bachelor Nation couples’ road to their happily ever after doesn’t always look the same, but these couples found The One in 2023.
The season 21 Bachelor Nick Viall may not have found his forever love on the ABC series in 2017, but he did get another try at his happy ending with Natalie Joy to kick off 2023.
The “Viall Files” podcast host previously proposed to Vanessa Grimaldi after his Bachelor season. The twosome called it quits in August 2017.
The two-time Bachelorette semifinalist — who competed on both Andi Dorfman and Kaitlyn Bristowe’s seasons — was first linked to Joy in 2019. The couple, however, didn’t officially start dating until summer 2020.
Viall’s connection with the surgical technician was very apparent to his inner circle, who predicted in November 2021 that someday they’d get engaged.
“They could be the next Bachelor Nation couple to get engaged,” an insider exclusively told Us Weekly at the time, noting that friends of the Dancing With the Stars alum “cannot wait for [an engagement] to happen because they know how long he’s been waiting to find The One.”
Three days after announcing their engagement via social media in January, Viall gushed over his bride-to-be.
“Many of us have hoped our path to love should to be clean, pure, and without disappointment. I have been that person. In reality, for many of us, our path to love is messy, dirty, and full of heartbreak,” the Don’t Text Your Ex Happy Birthday author wrote via an Instagram tribute on January 15. “I consider myself truly blessed and lucky to have lived through the mess, so I can fully appreciate what I have in this moment. @nnataliejjoy, to me your are perfect. You’re a protector of the people you love. Your heart outshines your incredible beauty. You radiate joy and bring so many smiles to those you get to be in your presence. I promise to wake up everyday and choose you, us, and our family. Forever ❤️.”
Viall, for his part, isn’t the only Bachelor or Bachelorette alum to take the next step in their relationship in 2023.
Hannah Ann Sluss, who fans met on season 24 of The Bachelor, revealed on January 25, that she and football star Jake Funk are engaged.
Sluss kept her relationship with the Los Angeles Rams player quiet to start in 2021 after having such a public breakup with Bachelor Nation’s Peter Weber. The pilot proposed to Sluss on the show’s March 2020 finale, but later called off the engagement after admitting he still had feelings for runner-up Madison Prewett. Weber later broke it off with Prewett and is now dating Kelley Flanagan.
Following her dramatic split from Weber, Sluss opted to keep her romance with Funk under wraps until February 2022. “We met a couple months ago and as soon as we met, we just had an instant connection and basically [we’ve been] inseparable since day one,” she exclusively told Us in April 2022 of her relationship with the running back. “Just getting to know him and us being together and incorporating our lives together, it’s just been very seamless and easy.”
Scroll down to see which of your Bachelor Nation favorites got engaged this year: