Before Britt Stewart could teach Daniel Durant a single step, she had to learn how to talk to him. The Dancing with the Stars pro was paired with the CODA actor for season 31 in 2022, and Durant — born deaf — communicates in American Sign Language. Stewart’s decision, made on the spot, would shape both the partnership and the marriage that followed: she would learn ASL herself. “When I met him and found out he was my partner on Dancing with the Stars, immediately I was like, I must learn ASL because I’m teaching him how to dance. I’m not going to use his interpreter,” she said at the time.
Consider what that choice meant in practice. A dance rehearsal is a stream of micro-corrections — counts, weight shifts, hand placements, musical cues a deaf dancer cannot hear. Routing every one of those instructions through an interpreter would have kept a wall between the partners. Stewart chose to climb over it instead, learning to sign so she and Durant could communicate directly, body to body, in the language he thinks in. As a professional dancer, she was used to speaking through movement; now she learned to speak through sign language too.
(CaseyJNewell / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0))Week Eight, and a Fifth-Place Finish
The partnership worked. Stewart and Durant danced their way to a fifth-place finish in season 31, one of the strongest runs by a deaf contestant in the show’s history, built on ballroom routines rehearsed in two languages at once. But the bigger story was unfolding off the leaderboard. Stewart later told PEOPLE that the romantic chemistry arrived during the eighth week of the competition. “I was really able to see him and his experience in Dancing with the Stars, but then just a little of his life too,” she said in December 2023.
Durant’s version matches hers. He “couldn’t imagine not seeing” Stewart once the show ended, and concluded that what they felt was “more than friends.” After elimination, “naturally we connected and started dating.” The couple kept the romance private for a few months, then confirmed it with a Valentine’s Day Instagram post in 2023 — a reveal their season’s fans had been hoping for since the rehearsal footage first aired.
(CaseyJNewell / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0))Vows in the Language They Built Together
Engaged in December 2023, Stewart and Durant married on Aug. 23, 2025, exchanging their wedding vows in ASL — a ceremony detail that brought their whole story full circle. The language she learned to teach him to dance became the language in which they promised each other forever. A year later, at The Hollywood Reporter‘s Creators A-List Party on Oct. 21, Stewart named communication as the biggest lesson of their first year of marriage: “I learned his language. We have this beautiful communication between us that holds our relationship together, and we just love on each other.”
(Lyn Fairly Media / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0))Durant’s CODA world — a film that put deaf actors and ASL at the center of an Oscar-winning story — is part of this love story too. Stewart did not just date a deaf actor; she entered his culture, his language and his community, the one his co-stars helped bring to mainstream screens. Plenty of showmances begin with choreography. This one began with a decision about respect: that the burden of communication would not sit on the deaf partner alone. Three years, one engagement and one wedding later, Stewart’s year-one verdict is that the decision is still paying out — every single day, in every conversation, signed or spoken.
The speed of it still impresses the people around them. Durant has recalled that Stewart picked up ASL remarkably fast — that they relied on an interpreter at first, but were communicating on their own remarkably early in the season, and that their friendship deepened precisely there, in the space where a third person’s voice used to be. For a deaf actor who has spent his career meeting hearing collaborators halfway, a partner who traveled the full distance to him was something new. Stewart frames it more simply: she was teaching him to dance, and she was not going to do it through a middleman.
That is why the couple’s Aug. 23, 2025 wedding landed so hard with fans: the vows were exchanged in ASL, the language of their rehearsals turned into the language of their promises. And it is why Stewart’s first-anniversary reflections, shared at the Creators A-List Party on Oct. 21, keep circling back to the same word. Communication was not the theme of their wedding or their first year. It was the theme of their first week — the week a dance pro decided that “I must learn ASL” and quietly changed both of their lives.
Plenty of couples say communication is everything. Stewart and Durant are the rare pair who can point to the exact moment they proved it: a rehearsal studio, season 31, a pro learning to sign so her partner would never have to dance through a translator. Everything since — the fifth-place run, the Valentine’s Day reveal, the engagement, the signed vows, the first anniversary — is that one decision, still unfolding.
It also reframes what a “showmance” can be. Dancing with the Stars pairings are professional arrangements first — a pro, a celebrity, a trophy neither may win. Stewart and Durant’s run ended in fifth place, short of the final, and still became the season’s most durable story, because the partnership’s real achievement was never a leaderboard position. It was a hearing dancer deciding her deaf partner deserved to be taught in his own language, and a deaf actor discovering that the person across the rehearsal room was learning to meet him there. The romance, when it surfaced in week eight and was confirmed on Valentine’s Day 2023, grew directly out of that respect — which may be why, years and one wedding later, it shows no signs of being a television story at all.