‘The Ultimatum’: Lisa & Brian Give Relationship Update After Shocking Pregnancy
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On Season 2.]
The most dramatic moment of The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On Season 2’s first eight episodes came early on, when the original couple, Lisa Horne and Brian Okoye, got into a blowout fight in Episode 2.
A double-whammy shocker came next: Lisa soon learned she was pregnant. She and Brian chose to leave the show prematurely as a result; co-host Nick Lachey announced the pregnancy and the pair’s departure to the rest of the cast at the Choosing Ceremony in Episode 3.
During the first cocktail hour after the breakups, Lisa (who issued the ultimatum to Brian) didn’t like watching her ex-boyfriend spend one-on-one time with Riah (who received the ultimatum from Trey). She interrupted their harmless chat, and the fight devolved from there. While arguing outside, Lisa called Riah a “Hooters bitch” and a “dense-ass female,” despite only being on Day 2 of the experiment and hardly knowing the woman. Lisa also hit Brian’s face during the heated exchange.
Viewers saw when Lisa told Brian about the baby, and the pair seemed excited and happy. They said in this talk that they didn’t want a baby to be the reason they stayed together. Given that, are Lisa and Brian still together now? TV Insider caught up with the pair to find out.
“Me and Brian are in a really great place. We are still together, happily still together, so everything’s good right now,” Lisa tells TV Insider. Nowadays, they’re busy raising their child, and it took a lot of work for them to get to this happy place.
Lisa explains what caused her meltdown in Episode 2: “I think prior to the cocktail party, I was fine. I was just like, we’re in this experiment. I’m the one who dragged him here. I’m open to see what happens. I was already feeling high anxiety, I’m not going to lie. I was very anxious. But once we got there, and just, I don’t know. It’s just being in that close, intimate setting and seeing the person that you love engage with other potential partners that may be a perfect fit for them; I just was like, it was too much. I lost it. It was just intense. That’s how I was feeling. Very intense.”
She says despite bringing her partner into this experiment and despite them having technically broken up, watching Brian date other people still felt like cheating.
“I know it’s crazy to say because it’s like you willingly go into this experiment, and that is the choice that you both make amicably, but it still feels like, oh my God, you’re cheating on me,” Lisa says. “Obviously, that’s not the case, but that’s how it feels.” “There’s no grieving period” for the relationship, she adds. “You get that night to sleep on it, and then it’s boom, you’re on go the next day. So yeah, it was intense.”
Courtesy of Netflix
Brian says he wasn’t all that surprised by Lisa’s interjection. “I thought maybe it was a time that she wanted to have a conversation with both of us or with just me, which is perfectly fine because, at that point, everybody had had a conversation with someone that they wanted to explore more with or just get to know more,” he explains. “But I think kind of how it escalated was a shock. I mean a shocker to me.”
“I didn’t want it or expect it to get to that level, and I don’t think she did either,” he goes on. “I think in the moment, though, it was just so many emotions flowing. It was kind of hard to hold back. And I think once you’re in that moment, you just want to get your point across so passionately about it that you don’t realize what’s actually really going on until afterward.”
Receiving the ultimatum and honestly participating in the experience was “wild” for Brian. Making sense of it all required looking at it as his “new reality in a sense because that’s what we agreed that we would do in order to hopefully better ourselves and potentially better our relationship.” Lisa wasn’t alone in her struggle to adjust to the experiment. “I think it became more and more real actually seeing it,” he says, “and for me it became real, too.”
The pregnancy changed everything, and a lot of deep talks were had after leaving the show in order to work through what happened during filming. “In that moment of deciding to leave, no, there wasn’t much of a conversation there. It was like, what’s the right thing to do for what’s to become our family and the child that we’re bringing into the world?” he says of the departure. “But once we left, yeah, the conversation [about the fight] definitely was had. She took accountability for her actions, and I did, too, in the sense [of] just realizing that a lot of those emotions she had weren’t stemmed from that moment. It was prior stuff, before even coming on the show that we have since resolved.”
“For me, a lot of personal things changed after going into the experiment,” says Lisa, “especially in regards to me and how I wanted to go about my relationship going forward in regards to being very adamant about what I wanted. And not only that, but also learning to respect him on another level and myself on a different level, and just learning [how to] compromise. That was something that I wasn’t too big on going into the experiment, which led to the ultimatum. But I’m very big on that [now] and giving each other grace in the relationship.”
The Ultimatum, Season 2 Episodes 9-10, Wednesday, August 30, Netflix
