Vanessa Lachey has shared some intimate insights into her almost 14-year marriage to her husband, Nick Lachey.
The Love Is Blind co-hosts opened up about their bedroom antics and explained how they keep the romance alive after almost two decades together and three kids, Camden, 12, Brooklyn, 10, and Phoenix, eight.
Vanessa admitted that she and Nick schedule one day a week to be intimate and another for logistical planning.
Recalling Nick’s reaction to planned intimacy, Vanessa, 44, told Brides magazine: “He’s like, ‘What, schedule a sex day?’ It sounds weird when you say that, so we decided: Wednesday – hump day.”
Explaining why they don’t mix their pleasure with business and have two penciled-in days, Vanessa said: “I don’t want the time that we have for intimacy and connection to be taken over by logistics, but that’s our life. I think we’re coming into an age of having to have a hump day and a logistics day.”
Another important factor in maintaining their marriage is therapy. “It’s really important to have a third-person perspective that’s an unbiased opinion,” the NCIS: Hawai’i actress explained.
“Anything that’s worth having takes work,” Nick, 51, added. “To me, that’s a cornerstone of life, and marriage is no different. There’s no shame in that.”
The couple met in 2006, shortly after Nick’s public divorce from Jessica Simpson, when Vanessa starred in his “What’s Left Of Me” music video.
Vanessa admitted that she and Nick were only able to fully “commit” to their own relationship when they both “let go” of his divorce.
“He was literally in a very public marriage and a very public divorce, and I had to go through all that [expletive] very publicly and it was very hard for us,” she said in 2022 on Netflix’s Ultimatum: Marry or Move On – which she and Nick also co-host.
“It wasn’t until the moment that he was like, ‘I’m gonna let it go,’ and I said, ‘I’m gonna let it go,’ and we truly committed to each other.'”
The couple dated for five years before they married on July 15, 2011, but it wasn’t an easy road to the altar as they temporarily split in 2009.
Vanessa admitted that she felt she had no choice but to give Nick “an ultimatum” after their relationship stalled.
She said: “We dated for five years. So, I finally said, ‘What are we doing?’ I had moved in with him, I had renovated his entire bachelor pad, there was a bar in the pool, I was like, ‘Whatever you want’, and now I’m like, ‘OK I want to put kids in the pool.’
“If I’m being completely candid and transparent, we took a break. We both saw one other person and we realized that if we got out of our own way, we could be amazing together.
“But it took me seeing somebody else and me realizing I don’t mind the things that bugged me or were holding me back. I don’t mind all that, the bigger picture is how I feel about that person and their values of wanting to be with me and knowing everything about me.”