Dancing With the Stars pros Daniella Karagach and Pasha Pashkov “still feel like teenagers” together, which impacted how they decided to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary.
“We’re literally going to go to Six Flags and ride some rollercoasters,” Karagach, 31, exclusively told Us Weekly on Wednesday, July 17, noting they used to be big amusement park fans until they welcomed daughter Nikita in May 2023.
“We had our baby, and now all of a sudden, I have this fear of God forbid something happens to me on this roller coaster,” Karagach admitted. “So now I’m, like, a little freaked out. But at the same time, we don’t get to do this kind of stuff often anymore because we want to ride the teacups nowadays and the carousel. It is nice to do something for us.”
Karagach and Pashkov, 38, met in 2009 during a ballroom dance rehearsal and started dating one year later.
“We had a dance tryout to see if we go into fit well as dance partners and I would say there was an immediate chemistry, just dance-wise,” Pashkov recalled to Us. “Something clicked right away. Then, shortly after that, it transformed into a romantic relationship.”
Karagach was initially the one to pursue Pashkov first, but he felt the same.
“I was aware that she liked me, and I liked her, too,” he quipped. “So I’m like, ‘Well, that’s going to be easy to make a move knowing that it’s going to be a yes.’”
For Karagach, it was “easy” to transition their working relationship into a romantic one since they had a seamless foundation.
“We knew each other before we started dancing together. Pasha had such a reputation of being such a gentleman, and before my mom found out we’re trying out together for a partnership, she was already head over heels in love with Pash because he’s just such a good human being and he comes from a great family,” Karagach recalled. “We’ve had the same teachers growing up, we’ve been in the same studios growing up, [and] so we’ve always been together in the same place.”
She added, “So when we started dating, we knew each other so well, and it just felt so natural.”
Pashkov popped the question “exactly” on their fourth dating anniversary in July 2014.
“I basically said, ‘How about we just reminisce and remember how it all went down the very first time when we started dating,” he told Us on Wednesday. “And I was like, ‘Let’s reenact it.’ And we were going and remembering the lines line for line, what was going on, how we were interacting. … And basically the last one I said, ‘I think I’m falling for you.’”
When he said the quote for a second time, he tweaked his phrasing to say, “I think I’m falling for you all over again,” while getting down on one knee.
Karagach, meanwhile, was “so excited” that she couldn’t barely “put it together that [Pasha] had just proposed.”
“The first thing I did was pace around the house and the poor guy was [holding] the ring following me around the house until I actually looked at it and put it on,” she said. “I was in such shock. It was so funny.”
Karagach and Pashkov tied two years later with a “huge wedding” in her hometown in New York.
“It was one of those just magical, everything fell in perfect alignment,” Pashkov said, adding that their marriage since then has, luckily, “been super easy.”
Karagach and Pashkov still work together as pro dancers on Dancing With the Stars, their eponymous wedding dance school and jewelry line Dainty.
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“We use each other for choreography, for an opinion,” Pashkov said of how they handle competing opposite one another on DWTS. “We show videos to each other of ourselves, dancing our stuff and getting that third-eye perspective [and] an opinion that you trust.”
He added, “It’s a family affair. We’re together, we’re a unit. Even though on the show it looks like we’re two separate couples competing against each other, but we are helping each other throughout the whole process.”
With reporting by Christina Garibaldi
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