Survivor contestant says yes to Fijian boyfriend’s romantic marriage proposal
‘I met my beautiful islander, Apakuki, we stole each other’s hearts and he put a ring on it’
She famously dated professional cricketer Lee Carseldine for three years, after they met on Australian Survivor in 2016.
But that relationship didn’t have a happy ending, and now El Rowland has found another love that’s knocked her for six, and they’re getting married.
Last Wednesday, the 36-year-old author and poet shared a video to Instagram of the romantic moment “her beautiful Fijian boyfriend”, Apakuki, proposed.
In the dream-like sequence, created by Lunasity Media, El is seen walking through a mangrove in a pink floor-length tutu, before stumbling upon Apakuki, who is waiting alongside a picnic setting. El then leaps into his arms and straddles him, before he falls to bended knee and pops the question every girl wants to hear from the man of her dreams.
She captioned the footage: “I met my beautiful islander, Apakuki, we stole each other’s hearts and he put a ring on it. Soon to be Mrs Elena Sumasumavodre.”
In June, El told Daily Mail Australia she had been dating Apakuki for six months and described him as ‘a beautiful, loving soul’. “He works for Qantas Group as an operations manager and I have finally found my true north and we want to have babies and get married,” she said at the time.
El was previously dating Lee Carseldine, whom she met on Survivor in 2016.
They were in a relationship for three years and raised a blended family together, with El being a mother to one son, Darcy, while Lee has two sons, Sam and Jake. El spoke about their break-up on Mike Gunner’s podcast in May, admitting that in hindsight, the couple should have split ‘right at the beginning’ of their three-year romance, but she felt obliged to stick it out.
“It was tough and purely for my loyalty I stuck with that [the relationship], but if I went on my emotions, I would have probably broken up right at the beginning because we didn’t speak the same love languages,” she explained.
She described Lee, 43, as an ‘amazing’ person, but said they were ‘different people’.