Nick Lachey opened up about his divorce from Jessica Simpson during the Season 11 premiere of “Love Is Blind.”
The singer and co-host, 52, made the comments on the Oct. 14 episode while speaking with contestant Erika Ellis in the women’s lounge alongside his wife and fellow co-host, Vanessa Lachey, 45. Ellis had shared that she struggled with when to disclose her own previous marriage to potential matches.
“Well, as some of you may know, I was previously married before I met my incredible wife,” Nick responded.
“I would make the very unique argument that it gives you a leg up because you know from that experience what it is you truly want,” he continued.
Vanessa weighed in to reassure Ellis, adding that a prior marriage was nothing to be ashamed of. “We all have messy pasts, all of us,” she said.
Nick and Simpson, 46, were married from October 2002 to June 2006 and became household names through their MTV reality series “Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica,” which ran from 2003 to 2005.
This was not the first time Nick has publicly addressed the lasting impact of that split. During Season 3 of Netflix’s “The Ultimatum,” he spoke with a contestant about marriage fears and drew from his own history.
“I, too, was previously married, divorced, so I understand the hurt, the scars that exist from that,” he said on that series.
He pushed back against letting past pain dictate future happiness. “Don’t let your past define your future,” he added. “What I truly always wanted in my life, which was to have a beautiful marriage and a beautiful family — if I hadn’t retained my belief in that, I wouldn’t have ever realized the beautiful life I have with this woman,” he said, referring to Vanessa.
The “98 Degrees” singer married Vanessa in 2011, and the couple shares three children: son Camden, 14, daughter Brooklyn, 11, and son Phoenix, 9. Simpson, who announced her split from estranged husband Eric Johnson in January 2025 after a decade of marriage, has since been linked to musician Thomas Eisenhood. She and Johnson share three children: daughter Maxwell, 14, son Ace, 13, and daughter Birdie, 7.
The ex-spouses had an unexpected encounter earlier this year when they found themselves on the same flight from Los Angeles to Kauai, Hawaii, in March. Nick later discussed the reunion during a May appearance on “Watch What Happens Live,” noting it had been two decades since their marriage ended.
“We hadn’t seen each other in those 20 years, then spent six and a half hours on a flight to Hawaii together,” he said on the Bravo program. He described the interaction as “strangely OK” and said everyone was “very, very cordial” and “very respectful.”
Nick also claimed on the show that Simpson’s three children were seated in a “separate class of service” from their mother, implying they flew economy while Simpson was in first class. Simpson subsequently defended the arrangement, explaining that her mother, Tina Ann Drew, had purchased the tickets.
The March flight marked a rare direct interaction between the former couple, who have largely led separate public lives since their highly documented split. While Simpson has built a fashion empire and recently returned to the spotlight with new music and her new relationship, Nick and Vanessa have established themselves as a hosting duo for Netflix’s reality franchise.
Nick’s framing of his first marriage as ultimately instructive rather than purely painful aligns with his broader message to “Love Is Blind” participants. His advice to Ellis positioned prior romantic failure as a tool for clarity rather than a liability in the show’s accelerated dating experiment.