At the Love Is Blind season 7 reunion back in late October 2024, there were only two newlyweds left standing: Garrett and Taylor and Tyler and Ashley. Now, three months after the drama-filled Netflix special, there's only one, as Ashley has announced she is ending her marriage to Tyler.
On January 21, 2025, Ashley Adionser shared an exclusive statement to People about her split from Tyler Francis. "After much reflection, I want to share that Tyler and I have been separated for several weeks and have now made the difficult decision to end our marriage," she said. “While I had hoped for mutual understanding and transparency in our relationship, it has become clear that our paths are no longer aligned, making it impossible for me to continue in this marriage.”
"This was not a decision I made lightly, but one I know is necessary for my own growth and peace," she continued. "While this chapter is ending, I will always hold respect for the time and love we shared. I kindly ask for privacy during this deeply personal time as I focus on healing and building a new future. Thank you for your understanding and support."
Now, fans on social media are calling the impending divorce unsurprising and delivering both waves of support and I told you so's in Ashley's direction.
“The unfortunate part is that everyone would’ve understood Ashley leaving Tyler when all that stuff got aired out,” wrote one LIB fan on X. “She doubled down & tried to act like people were miserable bc they clocked Tyler being a messy liar. Now you look silly enduring ALL of that just to divorce anyways… therapy and a support system will get her all the way together. She’ll be fine.”
It's true: Tyler and Ashley's breakup is shocking, but not all that shocking. After all, their red-flag-filled union was one of the most chaotic on-screen relationships in Love Is Blind history, with most of the drama unfolding while the cameras weren't rolling. The biggest reveal of reality show's seventh season was the bombshell that Tyler is the father of three children via sperm donation for a friend, and fans on social media dug up photos and videos that suggested Tyler's dynamic with his kids was more involved than he seemed to portray to Ashley on-screen.
The last time we saw Tyler and Ashley together, they were perfectly aligned — they addressed the kids scandal within the first few minutes of the highly anticipated reunion, still hedging around the details of Tyler's relationship with his three children.
Tyler maintained his previous claim that he helped a friend and her wife “start a family, but her wife ended up leaving her and left her high and dry," and dismissed the photos that surfaced of him spending Christmas with the kids by saying, “I've spent holidays with all my friends, all their kids.” He even shed a few tears before his soon-to-be-ex-wife jumped in to defend him.
Ashley claimed Tyler lied about the true depths of his relationship with the kids on-camera in hopes of preserving a level of privacy, and claimed viewers were “insulting” her “intelligence" by claiming she was “blindsided” by this information. According to Ashley, she knew everything — we just never got to see her receive the full story. “Who do you think has better insight on what's going on, social media or me?” she notoriously said.
At the time of writing, Tyler has not yet spoken out about the breakup. In case you missed it all, keep reading for a complete breakdown of all the drama that went down between Tyler and Ashley on Love Is Blind season 7 — here's the sperm donor secret, explained.
Did any red flags pop up in Tyler and Ashley's relationship before she knew about the kids?
As seen in the first six episodes of the season, Tyler Francis and Ashley Adionser became engaged after falling in love in the Love Is Blind pods and quickly became a fan favorite due to their seemingly intense compatibility and genuine connection. During their honeymoon in Mexico, fans picked up on a few red flags Tyler threw into the air, such as warning Ashley that folks back home who know him “in real life” would tell her he's “not nice.”
“Like, nah, I just wasn't nice to y'all,” he said. “There's nothing that no one can tell me,” Ashley said, standing firm in her trust for her fiancé. “You never know who comes out of the woodworks,” Tyler answered. (Um… OK.) Of the seven couples who ultimately got engaged through the experiment this season, Tyler and Ashley seemed to have the healthiest relationship of them all. Until mid-season, at least.
In between episode batch drops, fans discovered that Tyler is the biological father of three children, a major life detail that we had not yet seen him disclose during any of the episodes. Fans scrambled to put the pieces together based on the timeline of the show and what Tyler and Ashley had shared about their lives up until that point.
On October 7, two days before another episode batch drop of LIB season 7, a series of TikTok videos by @storytimewithrikkii, a creator who specializes in reality television recaps, began to go viral across multiple social media platforms. In the very first video, with the thumbnail title “Tyler's GFs are coming ‘out the woodwork,'” Rikkii claimed that Tyler is the father of three children, two twin girls and a boy, along with other allegations about the depth of his dynamic with the children, which included resurfaced social media posts and photos and accusations of “hiding” the young kids. (Teen Vogue previously reached out to Netflix for comment.)
So, how and when did Tyler tell Ashley about his three kids?
Perhaps the biggest draw of the Tyler & Ashley drama for Love Is Blind fans was the question of whether Ashley knew about the kids. Fans often speculate that Netflix leaves important details about the Love Is Blind connections on the cutting room floor, potentially even chopping entire engagement storylines from the show; with this in mind, fans were unsure of whether Tyler was truly deceiving his LIB fiancée or if they had privately discussed the matter and it was just viewers that were in the dark about this major detail (as Ashley later claimed).
In the final minutes of episode 9, we saw Tyler and Ashley 13 days before the wedding, having a tough conversation in their shared apartment during the daytime. “I'm not sure this is a resolution kind of conversation,” Ashley said. “‘Oh, let’s hug and pretend like nothing happened.' For me, this is not that. This is a big thing.” She then revealed that she left the apartment the night before to “get [her] thoughts together," and begins to cry, accusing Tyler of dropping a “bomb."
“I'm replaying and thinking of every conversation we've had where this could've been brought up," she said. "This is something I should've known before agreeing to say yes.” Ashley went on to share her frustration that Tyler expressed his interest in having multiple kids with her without disclosing that he is the father of multiple children already, especially since his children are “with someone [he] knows.”
We then see Tyler tell Ashley he has two girls and a boy, and Ashley demanding to “know everything.” “I have nothing," she said. “You have yet to show me anything. ‘Here are the documents that say, I’m uninvolved.'” Ashley continued, explaining how their trust had been broken: “To come in this scenario and fall in love with a guy who has three sperm babies, sperm-donor babies, is a lot to absorb." Tyler responded by affirming his feelings for Ashley, claiming that he still wanted to marry her and start a family with her.
But based on the conversation we eventually saw in episode 10 — in which Ashley and Tyler are in the same clothing at their apartment, but at nighttime — it seemed as though what Tyler told her might not be the full truth. It seemed as though Tyler was framing his parentage as “trying to help a couple have kids.”
“I had a very close friend, her and her wife wanted to have a baby,” Tyler said in episode 10. “And they couldn't afford a sperm donor. I thought that was God telling me, ‘Help someone else.’ And it felt good.”
When Ashley asked Tyler explicitly whether the “kids know what you look like,” Tyler paused then replied: “Hmm, I don't think so.” The couple then agreed to continue working on their relationship and potential marriage, despite Ashley's expressed uncertainty about the situation.
From what we saw of that conversation and what we saw circulating on social media, it's fair to assume that Ashley did not yet know the full story. In later scenes in episode 10 at the hostile Great Gatsby-themed party, Ashley repeated the version of the story Tyler told her on-screen to the rest of the female contestants, and defended his character and positive involvement in their relationship. In episode 11, Tyler apologized to Ashley on-screen and Ashley told him that “the shock has worn off."
“Now I'm able to rationalize certain things and paint a picture for myself of what it would look like if, like, the kids came into our lives in five years,” Ashley said hypothetically at the time. “Would I be okay with it? I feel like I want you in my life, no matter what. It's not what I intended for myself but I feel like it's worth the reward, which is you.”
Later in episode 11, Ashley picked out her wedding dress and went skydiving with Tyler as a grand gesture to declare their commitment to their love and their willingness to “tackle anything" together. When Ashley made a sperm donation joke, Tyler shook his head with a straight-faced reaction, not laughing along with his fiancée.
How did Tyler and Ashley address the secret?
While the season was still airing, Ashley did not speak publicly about the paternity drama, which is in line with past behavior from Love Is Blind contestants — they're typically bound by an NDA and can only discuss their unfiltered experiences on the show after their season has aired in its entirety.
But the 32-year-old reality star did post a video on October 10 on her TikTok account with on-screen text that reads, “When people keep asking you about gossip but you're in your own little world," to audio that says “N**** I'm just doing what I'm doing.” Funnily enough, that video could be interpreted a few ways: that Ashley was standing by her man in the face of “gossip,” or that she couldn't yet talk as freely as she'd like and was trying to remain unbothered. Based on the events of the reunion, it was the former.
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What did Tyler and Ashley say about the kids at the reunion?
At the reunion, Tyler attempted to defend his situation with Ashley's support. “Those kids, that family, they did not sign up for this… I stepped in voluntarily and helped... I played a part that became very shaky with a friend,” Tyler said, crying. "There’s no rulebooks [for] this. Ashley knows all of this. This is news to the world, but this has never been news to us… I don’t owe anyone an explanation besides my wife. I'm good. We're good. I'm not gonna keep harping on it.”
Ashley backed up her then-husband, vouching for his character. “He is a good person, who went in a little too deep and didn’t know what to do next,” she said. “When I said ‘I do,’ I said ‘I do’ to all of it. I was aware and took on what I wanted to. This is a once in a lifetime kind of love. This is a rarity, and it's something that is worth risking anything for.”
What else did Tyler and Ashley say about their relationship?
Once they were allowed to speak more openly about the rollercoaster experience of being on the show, Tyler and Ashley offered differing levels of perspective on their relationship.
When asked by People on October 6 why he tried to warn Ashley about his reputation as a “not nice” guy, Tyler said he did it because he “was in a bubble before her.” “Anyone that I dated, the slightest interest of not being serious, I was okay with cutting people off,” he told the outlet. “I am at a point in my age where I didn't want to waste anyone's time, so it could come off as mean or cold.”
“I just wanted to let her know that's the person I was but I came here to find love, and prior to, I was trying to,” he continued. "But of course dating is hard in itself, so I just wasn't into wasting people's time. And I may have come off cold and I just want to let her know, 'Hey, there are people that may be like, ah, he's an a**hole.' No, I'm just honest, honestly."
In a separate interview conducted by People, Ashley revealed she was shocked at the idea that others could perceive her fiancé as unkind. “The whole point of coming into this experiment is to jump in with both feet and accept someone for who they are," she reflected. “So when Tyler did say something like, 'Oh, some people may not say that I'm nice,' I'm like, 'You are amazing to me. You're the sweetest person. How could someone not think that you're nice?' I was shocked by that.”
Ashley said he went "into detail" and defended his behavior by claiming he wasn't “the most pleasant person” after working “long hours.” “That's self-aware to me. I think everyone comes with something and I think the good part is recognizing it and realizing the person you want to evolve to be,” she said. “So no red flags.”
In an interview published a few days later on October 9, Tyler told E! News that he had “no regrets” about his time in the pods and beyond. "There’s maybe a couple conversations that could’ve been had at a certain time, who knows?" he said. "I can’t sit back and wish that I could change something… I’m living in the present."
Tyler told the publication that he intentionally did not describe his appearance during his pod dates with Ashley in hopes of avoiding stereotypes. “I tried to keep away from it, because that was the big issue,” he said. "I’ve been judged based off being light-skinned. Being cheaters and liars — all these things that you get with being light-skinned. So, I tried to keep away from physical appearance and just judge me for who I am, not what I look like."
On the other hand, Ashley seemed to also have no regrets. "I said what I said. Did what I did," she told E! News in another interview conducted separately. “I wouldn’t change a thing… I don’t care if you’ve been together for 50 years. Everyone’s evolving and changing, and the more your life changes, the more you evolve and change. It’s a never-ending cycle.”
While appearing on the Dear Future Wifey podcast in November, Tyler cited his contentious relationship with his children's mother as the current reason he “wasn't active” in his kids' lives, and reinforced his claim that he had never planned on being a present father figure. “I want them to have their family and leave me alone,” he said, adding that he felt like a “glorified babysitter that [the mother of their children] need money from.”
Love Is Blind season 8 is set to premiere on Netflix on February 14, 2025.
