A non-pod love! Love Is Blind’s Paul Peden has a new romance after his split from ex-fiancée Micah Lussier.
“Maybe best cocktails in San Diego,” Paul, 29, wrote via his Instagram Story on Thursday, June 1, alongside a sweet selfie of him and new girlfriend Geneva Dunham at the Noble Experiment speakeasy during a California vacation.
Dunham, for her part, also took to social media to share photos and videos from a separate Georgia getaway, which included photographs of them relaxing by the pool, taking in a baseball game and sharing a sweet smooch on the sidewalk.
“Had to brew up a couple Paul pics for witchstagram 🖤,” Dunham captioned the Wednesday, May 31, carousel. “Georgia never disappoints. Thank you @hollychelsea and @jobrian24 for the southern hospitality.”
This marks Paul’s first public relationship since he split from Micah, 27, aired earlier this year. The environmental scientist and marketing campaign manager got engaged on season 4 of the Netflix dating series, which premiered in March. The pair faced a handful of challenges on their way to the alter — including Micah’s lingering feelings for fellow contestant Kwame Appiah — and ultimately didn’t tie the knot.
When the moment came to say “I do,” Micah insisted that Paul be the first to answer on their wedding day. “It was kind of the last chance [for Paul] to, like, show me that you’re willing to take the risk and take the jump,” she exclusively told Us Weekly in April of the tense finale moment. “And I think that having him answer first was really the only way to do that. I worried that, maybe, he would say yes if I said yes — and I really wanted him to answer from his heart.”
While she shared that she “never doubted” that her ex-fiancé “cared” about her, Micah pointed out that “there’s no way of telling” whether they’d still be together if they had gotten married.
Paul, for his part, told Us that he was “super torn” up about his choice “until the very moment” he was standing in front of his bride.
“And I hadn’t made the decision, you know, as soon as it came out of my mouth, that’s when the decision was made,” he explained. “I don’t regret it. It was the right call, I think, at the time, and it was a realization that while we did love who we were in that moment, there’s a lot more to marrying someone than just that.”
The twosome briefly gave their relationship another try after cameras stopped rolling, but they ultimately decided to call it quits for good prior to the season 4 reunion in April.
During the reunion special, the Louisiana native came under fire when host Vanessa Lachey questioned his on-camera remarks about how he didn’t see his then-fiancée as the mother of his children.
Paul told Entertainment Tonight later that month that he felt like there was a “personal bias” against him at the taping, claiming was “extremely reductive” of Lachey, 42, to dismiss “all nuance and complexity” as to why he said “no” at the altar.
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“I was like, ‘F—k man.’ They kept drilling, drilling it down on me,” he told the outlet. “I think I said my piece. I think Vanessa might have had a little bit of personal bias in that scenario or at least I kind of detected that. I don’t know. But that’s just my assumption based on how she continued to drill into it after I gave my full rationale for why I felt the way that I did.”
The Disaster Movie star — who shares kids Camden, 10, Brooklyn, 8, and Phoenix, 6, with husband and Love Is Blind cohost Nick Lachey — subsequently sent Paul flowers to apologize for their heated exchange. “Thanks for acknowledging the accidental misleading @vanessalachey,” Paul wrote via his Instagram Stories in April alongside a snap of the bouquet.
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