Nick Lachey made a small diss against his ex-wife Jessica Simpson, 17 years after they split up, during the Love is Blind reunion special, which dropped on Netflix on Wednesday, November 9. While speaking to one of the couples who tied the knot on the reality show, the show’s host, 48, made a sly reference to his former marriage during a question for Matt Bolton. “[Marriage] is always better the second time, right?” he asked.
Matt had been married once before going on Love is Blind. On the show, he met his now-wife Colleen Reed, who he married in the show’s finale. He revealed his former marriage throughout the course of the show, and he agreed with Nick’s comment about second marriage. “Cheers, bud,” he said.
Nick and Jessica, 42, had gotten married October 2002, but separated in November 2005. When the “I Wanna Love You Forever” actress filed for divorce, she cited “irreconcilable differences.” They finalized their divorce the following year. Nick married his second wife Vanessa, who also co-hosts Love is Blind, in July 2011. Nick and Vanessa, 42, have three children together. Jessica also remarried. She’s been with her husband Eric Johnson, 43, since 2014, and they have three kids.
In the years since Nick and Jessica broke up, the pair have been open about their relationship and divorce. The Dukes of Hazard actress revealed she felt lonely after Nick remarried in her memoir Open Book. “I’m saddened beyond belief. Alone in the dark, with no one to call my own,” she wrote in a diary entry, published in the memoir.
While Jessica wrote much about their marriage in the book, Nick revealed he had no intentions to read it, because he “lived it” in a November 2021 interview with SiriusXM. “I know what the truth is so I don’t need to read it, or read someone’s version of it in a story that I know, that I lived it. No, I never read it,” he said.
Despite sharing intense details in her book, Jessica also admitted that she has mostly positive feelings about her ex in a 2020 interview with Glamour surrounding the book. “I still have a lot of love for Nick, because he taught me how to be,” she said. “I tried to handle everything [in the book about him] with as much care as possible.”