From the first impression rose to an engagement! Michelle Young found everlasting love with Nayte Olukoya on The Bachelorette season 18. The happy couple got engaged during the December 21 finale. Michelle and Nayte opened up EXCLUSIVELY with HollywoodLife about what’s next for them, and Michelle gushed about the moment she knew Nayte was the man for her.
“Viewers can talk a lot about or make assumptions of what goes on in overnights, but my favorite thing about Nayte was the fact that as soon as the cameras left, he literally jumped on the bed crisscross applesauce and was like, ‘Sit across from me.’ We just talked for hours and hours,” Michelle told HollywoodLife EXCLUSIVELY. “It allowed me the time to see someone who was experiencing feelings of love for the first time, being vulnerable for the first time with people, and giving him the time to have that to explain himself. I feel like that’s what really kind of showed me where he was at because when you sit down and have a conversation on the show at a cocktail party, it is very, very quick. It is brief, people interrupt, there’s drama, but that uninterrupted time where he could actually take the time to explain his feelings, I’m like, ‘Okay, I know where he stands. Got it.’”
Michelle admitted that she loves that Nayte has so much “intellect” and a “level of knowledge about relationships.” She added, “I know that he hadn’t been in love before. Even when I think back to my first time falling in love, you know you’re in love whether you’re 16 or whether you’re, you know… Just the way he spoke about relationships and what he wanted in a relationship. But also, it wasn’t necessarily all this fairytale stuff. It was very much this day to day how our relationship changes. That’s what truly kind of showed me that he’s already thought about what makes a relationship last and that he’s looking for things that make it last. All the butterflies and the roses and the intense passion, yes, we always want that to be a part of it, but it was those underlying things that we spoke about.”
The couple had to keep their engagement a secret until the finale aired. Nayte revealed that it “wasn’t that hard” to keep their relationship under wraps. There was “a lot of FaceTimes, a lot of texting,” Nayte said. “We would see each other frequently, secret trips to go see each other, things like that. But it wasn’t really difficult, you know what I mean? We were always talking, always just growing, learning everything. We’ve been definitely counting down the days, but 10 weeks for us to finally be able to be public wasn’t the worst. Ten weeks for the rest of your life, you know?”
Even though there have been some Bachelor Nation breakups recently — Claire and Dale, Tayshia and Zac, and Katie and Blake — Michelle and Nayte are not worried about their relationship. They feel rock-solid after having deep discussions about what they need out of their relationship.
“We had a conversation about how love changes and how it’s going to feel like it changes,” Michelle explained. “And really honestly sitting down and having a talk about what it’s truly dating in the public eye and how to argue, how to navigate through this when I’m struggling, what I need, what he needs when he’s struggling, and really just sitting down and realizing that it’s each other that we want. It’s not the spotlight. It’s not everything around that. That definitely can add pressure, uncomfortable feelings at times, but also, now that we’re out in public, tune into a relationship if you want. If not, that’s okay. I came here to find my person and spend the rest of my life with him. And that’s what we’re going to do.”
Michelle and Nayte are happily engaged, but they’re taking things slow before diving head-first into wedding planning. “Well, we’re definitely gearing up to start looking for dates for a wedding, but as of right now, we just got out of being on TV. Now we’ve got holidays, New Year’s, looking for a house, but the wedding is definitely coming,” Nayte told HollywoodLife.