Married bliss! One year after Jessica Batten and Benjamin McGrath celebrated their engagement, the twosome secretly got married.
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“Mr. & Mrs.,” the Love Is Blind alum, 36, captioned a Friday, September 16, Instagram post of their wedding photos, revealing they tied the knot on August 24.
While Batten and the 35-year-old foot-and-ankle surgeon had planned for a grand wedding ceremony, COVID-19 postponements and physical distance from their loved ones soon complicated matters.
“Amidst COVID and with family health and logistics with travel, we found ourselves between a rock and a hard place in trying to plan the wedding in 2022,” the pair told Brides magazine on Friday. “We tried to make it all work. We considered pushing out our date or moving the location to Chicago. Ultimately, we decided that we needed more time to pull off the massive celebration that we thought was worthy for our family and friends.”
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They added: “Considering the timing we are looking for in terms of family planning, we came to the conclusion that we would elope in 2022 and make big plans for a celebration down the road.”
Batten and McGrath — who shares daughter Poppy, 6, and son Ethan, 5, with a former partner — wed at the Santa Barbara Courthouse last month with just two couples as witnesses.
“[It’s] a classic landmark in our favorite city; the city where we fell in love,” Batten, who wore a Reem Acra gown, told the magazine. “As we started to plan our elopement, the courthouse became an obvious choice. … On the day of the wedding, our planners found a private nook in the courtyard, completely surrounded by palm trees – the perfect site to share our vows.”
After dating for one year, McGrath proposed to the reality TV alum in September 2021.
“It was a complete surprise, she had no idea,” he exclusively told Us Weekly one month later. “One day, I was just, like, ‘I’m going to do it, we gotta make this happen.’ … We’d never talked about a ring or anything like that, so I kind of planned it around her dad coming into town, with him kind of facilitating the surprise. And it turned out pretty good, I think we got her pretty good.”
The Netflix personality admittedly felt completely “overwhelmed” seeing her beau down on one knee.
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“It took me a minute, but I recited a line from Suits,” she recalled to Us in October 2021. “When we were [doing] long-distance, we were watching Suits, and we would just be on FaceTime and set the phone there and we’d just be watching together. So instead of saying yes, I said, ‘Do I have a brain in my head? Do I have a heart in my chest?’ And he liked that. Then, he forgot to put the ring on, so I reminded him, ‘You have to put the ring on now.’”
Batten — who plans to celebrate her nuptials with a large party next year — previously accepted a proposal from Mark Cuevas during season 1 of Love Is Blind. After a tumultuous journey, and concerns about their age gap, Batten called off their engagement during their finale wedding ceremony. Cuevas, for his part, married Aubrey Rainey earlier this month.
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