‘It’s a crazy way to meet someone – but I’m so happy!’
They paired up on the first day during their time in the villa.
And now, nearly six years on, Cara De La Hoyde and Nathan Massey, who married in 2019, have since become parents to Freddie-George, four, and one-year-old Delilah.
“I could never have imagined meeting my now-husband and father of my children on a TV show, it’s a crazy way to meet someone!” Cara, 31, tells Closer. “I was randomly asked if I wanted to go for an audition, and I thought, ‘Why not, I don’t reckon I’ll get in but I won’t have to pay rent for six weeks!’ It was just a fluke – but sometimes things are just meant to be, they happen for a reason.” The couple won the second series of the show and bagged the £50,000 prize. But although things were rosy while on the Balearic island of Majorca, Cara says they faced hardship when they returned to the UK – with the pair even separating for eight months the year after they appeared on the show, two weeks after she found out she was pregnant.
“We split up for a while, because everything got too much – we were under public scrutiny, and you feel like you have to live up to this appearance that people expect of you,” she explains. “It’s a very pressurised way to meet someone. Not so much in there, because we had such a smooth ride – but you’ve been in that bubble where everything’s perfect, and then you come out and you’re like, ‘Oh, we’ve both actually got lives and friends.’ So it’s a massive adjustment for any couple.”
Cara credits her pregnancy with son Freddie with reuniting her with Nathan, 29, and says, “We realised there was still something there and thought, ‘Let’s give it another go, we’ve got nothing to lose.’ To be honest, that break is the best thing we ever did – it gave us a chance to miss each other, as weird as that sounds.”
She adds, “It’s great to have the memories to look back on, that’s just quite a special thing – Nathan proposed to me in the villa and when the kids are a bit older, we can actually show them how we met. But it is bizarre. When you’re little, you don’t think, ‘I’m going to meet my husband after going on an ITV2 show in front of the whole of the British public’. And it’s bloody weird to think I had a boyfriend and I didn’t even have his phone number!”