During her time on The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On, April Marie made one thing clear: She wants to be married with kids. So obviously this season’s ending—in which her boyfriend of more than two years, Jake Cunningham, decided to end things and begin dating another woman—was a tough pill to swallow. What made it worse, however, was how he chose to do it.
The series found six couples speed-dating each another and taking a three-week crack at marriage with one of their fellow contestants before deciding whether to stay with their current partner or explore something new. In the season finale, which hit Netflix Wednesday, Jake chose to break things off with April and instead pursue a new relationship with Rae Williams—his trial spouse on the show.
While Jake’s break-up speech seemed as gentle as possible, it also included a curious choice of words. He told his ex-girlfriend that while he was not choosing her, “Me and Rae are not running off together. We’re not doing that.” Moments after the break-up, however, we see Jake approaching Rae to ask her to be with him—with plane tickets in hand to “anywhere in the world... Me and you just living life.” Um... excuse me?!
“Him not choosing me hurt,” April told The Daily Beast during a recent interview. “But hearing him say, ‘I’m not choosing you but I’m not choosing her either’ made me feel better.”
After seeing what came next, however, the disbelief welled up. “Seeing him just let me walk off crying like that and then approach this new girl that he just met a few weeks ago like, ‘Hey gorgeous’—in the same tone that I remember him approaching me when we first started dating—it was cringe, and it was also just disrespectful, and it broke my heart.”
That’s not to say, however, that April has any regrets. As she put it, “I knew what I was signing up for: Marry Me or Move On.”
April’s eagerness for marriage is inextricably bound with her desire for children. Early in the season she explained how fertility issues have prevented her from conceiving in the past, and during the show she took a pregnancy test after her period was more than a week late. It came out negative.
“There was that slight hope, like OK, I really, really, really want kids,” April said. “It’s been four years that I haven’t been able to conceive and it was just like, alright, pregnancy stick number 300 still not happening. It was just peace of mind for the way things were parting.”
Throughout the series, April emerged as the most candid among her fellow contestants. When Alexis Maloney and Hunter Parr got engaged before the trial weddings and a second couple, Lauren Pound and Nathan Ruggles, followed suit, it was April and Colby who expressed their frustration that not everyone was committed to the “process.”
So even though April and Colby were not each other’s first choice for a trial marriage, there was some kismet to the match. (Plus, as April points out, they’re both Tauruses.) Over time, however, Colby seems to have irritated a few of his fellow contestants, including Alexis and Isaiah “Zay” Wilson.
“I was totally blindsided on whatever the hell Colby was doing,” April said with a laugh. “I felt like I was the bad nanny; like I wasn’t keeping my eyes on him.”
Whenever she was out with Colby—dancing, riding horses, golfing—she found him to be fun, genuine, and upbeat. “I just never got a bad read on him,” she said. “I feel like he was the male version of me and we just got along.”
Isaiah “Zay” Wilson and April Marie on The Ultimatum reunion
NetflixSince the series, April has gone the same route as Love Is Blind’s Deepti Vempati, who “chose herself” after refusing to marry her jerk of a fiancé Abhishek “Shake” Chatterjee. Lo and behold, the cliché came true: When she stopped looking for love, it emerged out of thin air.
A few months after the show, she said, “This guy just came, swept me off my feet, we went on our first date, I didn’t think anything of it. I was just like, ‘OK, we’re gonna go to an awkward dinner, I’m gonna come home, yada yada yada. And here we are six months later, we’re still dating.”
And that’s what we call moving on.
