It might be the most low-key celebrity wedding reveal of the year. Bridget Marquardt, the former Girls Next Door star, has quietly married Nicholas Carpenter, her partner of 18 years — and the news did not come from a press release or a magazine exclusive. Carpenter broke it himself, casually, while appearing as a guest on the Monday, October 19 episode of the Girls Next Level Podcast, the show Marquardt co-hosts with her former castmate Holly Madison.
The reveal was as understated as the wedding itself. Marquardt, 53, joked during the episode that the couple still “have to have a wedding,” while Carpenter insisted that a celebration will happen at some point. In other words: the marriage is done, quietly and privately, but the party is still owed — a very on-brand order of operations for a couple who have done every milestone of their relationship in their own time and their own way.
A Love Story That Began at the Mansion
The couple’s story starts in the most famous house in reality television. Marquardt met Carpenter at the Playboy Mansion, where she was living as one of Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends during her years on The Girls Next Door. They began dating in 2008 — and they have been together ever since. October is their anniversary month, a detail that keeps proving significant: this October marks 18 years since that beginning.
Marquardt’s life has turned over several times within those 18 years. The reality star became a broadcaster, co-hosting Girls Next Level with Madison, where the two revisit their mansion years with humour and hindsight, and hosting her own paranormal show, the Ghost Magnet Podcast. Through every reinvention, Carpenter — a film director who stays largely out of the spotlight — has been the constant.
(Luke Ford / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5))The Spider Ring That Started the Countdown
Long before the quiet wedding, there was a very loud engagement ring. The couple announced their engagement on Instagram on October 1, 2015, and Marquardt unveiled a one-of-a-kind spider engagement ring — a pavé diamond spider, revealed in a Halloween-themed post captioned “Till Death Do Us Part.” It remains one of the most recognisable celebrity engagement rings ever designed, precisely because it looks like nothing else in any jeweller’s window.
Marquardt has explained that she wanted a non-traditional ring reflecting her personality and her love of the macabre — not, she has been keen to clarify, a particular love of spiders themselves. The proposal matched the ring’s theatre: Carpenter took her to a Los Angeles hiking trail by a waterfall they used to visit, planted a fake spider ring in the dirt as a decoy, and only then got down on one knee with the real diamond spider.
(Neon Tommy / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0))Eighteen Years, One Quiet “I Do”
Before Carpenter, Marquardt’s public life ran on a very different track. She was one of Hefner’s live-in girlfriends at the mansion, and before that she was married to Chad Marquardt from 1997 to 2008 — the surname she still uses professionally. The contrast between those chapters and this one is the story: a relationship that began in 2008, an engagement in 2015, and then a long, unhurried decade in which the couple simply got on with their lives together.
That is what makes the podcast reveal feel so right. There was no staged announcement photoshoot, no exclusive cover — just a husband mentioning, on his wife’s own show, that they had privately married, and the two of them laughing about the celebration still to come. Fans who commented on the episode treated the news less like a surprise than a long-awaited confirmation: after 18 years, the most patient couple in reality TV finally made it official.
(Toglenn / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0))What Comes Next
On the evidence of the episode, what comes next is a party. Marquardt’s joke — that they still have to have a wedding — and Carpenter’s insistence that a celebration will happen suggest family and friends will get their moment eventually, presumably with the same Halloween-adjacent flair the couple brought to their engagement. A spider motif somewhere in the décor feels less like a possibility than a certainty.
For now, though, the headline stands on its own: Bridget Marquardt and Nicholas Carpenter, together since 2008, engaged since 2015, are married. It took 18 years, one fake spider, one real diamond spider and one podcast episode to tell the world. Some love stories sprint. This one strolled — and arrived exactly where it always said it would: till death do us part.
Fans Have Followed Every Chapter
The reaction from longtime followers was immediate and emotional. Marquardt’s audience has tracked this relationship across its entire arc — the mansion meeting, the 2008 beginning, the spider-ring engagement that broke the internet’s jewellery pages in 2015 — and many treated the wedding news as the closing scene of a story they had invested in for nearly two decades. Comments on the podcast episode leaned heavily on one word: finally.
There was also fond amusement at the delivery. Of all the ways a celebrity wedding can be announced — the magazine cover, the coordinated Instagram grid, the televised special — Marquardt’s was a husband mentioning it mid-conversation on her own podcast, then both of them laughing about the celebration they still owe everyone. It confirmed what her listeners already believed about the couple: the milestones were never the point. The relationship was.
Marquardt continues to build her broadcasting life in parallel, co-hosting her nostalgia podcast with Madison and exploring haunted locations on her paranormal show. Carpenter remains happily out of frame, a director whose most famous production may now be an 18-year love story with a very quiet ending — or rather, a very quiet beginning, with a party still to come.