To say that Lisa and Brian’s time on Season 2 of The Ultimatum was a wild ride would be a serious understatement. The experiment quickly began to grate on the couple as they began sussing out trial partners, and they endured the shock of the century when Lisa discovered partway through the season that she was pregnant.
Understandably, the two left the show after hearing the news to sort through the big, complicated questions. Now, however, they’re happy to report that after a lot of hard work, they’re still together as new parents.
“We’re in a really great place—taking care of our family, co-parenting very, very well,” Lisa told The Daily Beast’s Obsessed during a recent interview. When asked if she had any idea leading up to the show that she might be pregnant, she recalled a discussion in which all of the women in the season realized they were due to have their periods at the same time—and hers, which is usually “spot-on,” was running late. It was then that she decided to take a test.
During his own interview with Obsessed, Brian noted with a laugh that his face basically says it all in the on-camera moment Lisa revealed her news to him.
“I was like, ‘Is this a joke?’” he recalled. “I knew she wouldn’t joke like that, right? But it hit me hard.”
At that moment, Brian said, he knew he had to make a split-second decision as to whether or not to stay on the show—and also, more importantly, whether he was ready to take on being a father. “But then I knew, I want things to work out with her more than anything.”
Pregnancy aside, Brian said, he knew that Lisa “is the person that I would ideally want to have a child with. But it was a crazy experience to hear it at first, I’m not gonna lie.”
As the couple said during the show, they didn’t want to stay together just because they were having a child—or under the assumption that doing so would suddenly fix their relationship. As Lisa put it in our interview, “After the show, it actually took some work… It took some time.”
“It was like, ‘Look, what are we going to do to make this work?’” she recalled, adding, “I’m very happy to be with the man that I am, because he took that next step of like, ‘OK, let’s do therapy—let’s do these things.’”
Both Lisa and Brian expressed regrets about the window The Ultimatum offers into their relationship. Lisa described their dynamic as goofy, loving, and fun, a sentiment Brian echoed. But their limited time on the show—just two episodes—was not without its difficult moments, including an explosive argument in a parking lot outside a cocktail party where Lisa grew angry at Brian for talking up another woman named Riah, whom Lisa called “this Hooters bitch,” a dig at Riah’s job. Lisa admitted to feeling remorse over that moment as well.
“I wish I would have handled the situation at the cocktail party a lot differently, because I didn’t want that to be like the premise of our relationship,” she said. At the same time, she added, she’s glad to have participated in the experiment with Brian, “because I don’t think anyone else may have been so graceful in regards to that. And so that’s what I'm thankful for.”
Brian, too, wishes that the Ultimatum-watching public could’ve seen them more in their element. “We’re fun people—like, we joke a lot,” he said. “But also at the same time, there were issues within our relationship that we wanted to fix.”
It was important, Brian said, for both of them to discover whether getting married was really what they wanted. (Lisa gave the ultimatum at the outset of the show; Brian, though committed to the relationship, was not convinced marriage was the right step.)
Because they had to leave early, Brian conceded, “We didn'’t get the opportunity to do that in this manner. But what I would say is that we did make the decision that even in leaving the show, we would still work on ourselves and work on each other.
“I think that was probably one of the most important decisions we made, outside of deciding to leave,” Brian said. “Because we’re having a child.”
