Every great proposal has a prop, and Nicholas Carpenter’s was a plastic spider. When he decided to ask Bridget Marquardt to marry him, he chose a Los Angeles hiking trail beside a waterfall the couple used to visit — and turned the moment into a two-act joke that fans of the former Girls Next Door star still retell a decade later. Now that the couple have privately married after 18 years together, that waterfall proposal is enjoying a well-earned second life in the spotlight.
Act One: The Decoy
Carpenter began by planting a fake spider ring in the dirt along the trail — a cheap novelty standing in for the real thing. It was a prank calibrated to exactly one person’s sense of humour. Marquardt built a public persona around the spooky and the strange, from her Halloween obsessions to her paranormal podcasting, and a plastic spider was guaranteed to delight her before the real surprise landed.
Then came act two. Down on one knee by the waterfall, Carpenter produced the genuine ring: a one-of-a-kind pavé diamond spider, designed specially for her. The couple announced their engagement on Instagram on October 1, 2015, in a Halloween-themed post under the words “Till Death Do Us Part” — a Halloween engagement announcement so perfectly pitched to Marquardt’s personality that it is still shared every spooky season.
(lukeford.net / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5))Why the Ring Matters
Marquardt has been clear about the brief. She wanted a non-traditional engagement ring that reflected her personality and her love of the macabre — not, as she has pointed out, an actual fondness for spiders. In an industry where celebrity rings compete on carat size, hers competed on character. The diamond spider became a small manifesto: jewellery should say who you are, not what you spent.
It also said something about the man who designed the moment. Carpenter, a working film director, is the quiet half of this couple — no reality shows, no red-carpet habit. The proposal showed his fluency in the only language that mattered: hers. Friends and fans who have followed the pair since they met at the Playboy Mansion and began dating in 2008 tend to cite the waterfall story as the moment they understood the relationship would last.
(Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0))From Engagement to a Very Quiet Wedding
What nobody predicted was the timeline. The engagement lasted roughly a decade. The wedding, when it finally came, was a private wedding with no announcement at all — the world learned of it only because Carpenter, guesting on the October 19 episode of the Girls Next Level podcast, mentioned it himself. Marquardt joked that they still “have to have a wedding,” and Carpenter promised a celebration will happen at some point.
The podcast reveal suited a couple whose milestones keep landing in the same month. October is their anniversary month: dating from October 2008, engaged in October 2015, married — as the world learned — in October 2026. Three of the biggest moments of an 18-year relationship, all in the month of pumpkins and plastic spiders.
(Zol87 from Chicago, IL, USA / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0))The Long Road Here
Context sharpens the sweetness. Marquardt’s earlier life was lived at maximum volume: she was one of Hugh Hefner‘s live-in girlfriends on national television, and before the mansion she was married to Chad Marquardt from 1997 to 2008. Carpenter arrived in the same year that chapter closed, and the relationship that followed has been defined by the opposite qualities — privacy, patience and a total absence of rush.
That is the real story the podcast episode told, beneath the jokes about the owed celebration. An 18-year relationship, a ten-year engagement and a wedding so private it surfaced as a conversational aside: Bridget Marquardt and Nicholas Carpenter did not just marry each other. They married on a schedule that ignored every convention of celebrity romance — and looked completely content doing it.
A Decade Between Question and Ceremony
Friends of the couple have never treated the long engagement as a warning sign, and the wedding news explains why. Marquardt and Carpenter built a life first — homes, careers, routines, a shared history stretching back to 2008 — and let the legal ceremony arrive when it felt like a formality rather than a finish line. In celebrity terms, where engagements are often announced before the relationship has survived a single holiday season, an 18-year courtship reads almost like a period piece.
The proposal story also rewards a second look for what it says about attention. Carpenter did not book a skywriter or a stadium screen. He chose a trail the two of them used to walk, a waterfall they already loved and a joke only she would fully appreciate. The most shared celebrity proposal of its year cost almost nothing and meant everything — a ratio the couple have maintained ever since, right up to a wedding announced between podcast segments.
What remains is the celebration Carpenter promised on air. If the engagement announcement is any guide — Halloween-themed, spider-forward, captioned with a gothic vow — the eventual party will be less a reception than a piece of theatre by and for the couple’s favourite month. October, presumably. It was always going to be October.
The mansion connection deserves one more beat, because it is easy to misread. Marquardt did not meet her husband despite the Playboy chapter of her life but inside it — and rather than treating that origin as an embarrassment to be edited out of the wedding story, the couple have never hidden it. Their podcast revisits those years weekly, with humour and clear eyes. A love story confident enough to include its own improbable first chapter is usually a love story that has done the work of understanding itself.
Listeners, predictably, demanded the celebration be podcast-documented when it comes. Carpenter, laughing, made no promises — which, given this couple’s history, is practically a confirmation.