Bachelor in Paradise alum Carly Waddell has ended her engagement to Todd Allen Tressler.
“I’m always real with you guys, so I’m going to be real with you now. I’m not wearing a ring,” Waddell, 39, said in a Wednesday, October 1, Instagram video. “I did break off my engagement about a month ago. We are living in a new city.”
She continued, “It’s not a decision that I personally made overnight. It was really bad timing because the kids had just started school and sports and all the things. You know what? It is what it is.”
Waddell shares daughter Bella, 7, and son Charlie, 5, with ex-husband Evan Bass, whom she was married to from 2017 to 2020. Waddell later moved on with Tressler, proposing to the attorney in 2023.
“I feel very at peace with this decision,” she said on Wednesday. “My kids are loving life in the new place. Honestly, dating after divorce and dating with kids is super difficult. You have to make tough decisions for yourself and for your family. So, that’s where I’m at.”
Waddell further noted that she had been putting off making a post about her broken engagement.
“Real talk. This is def a post I have been delaying,” she captioned her Instagram video. “But so I can feel a little more free, here we go.”
Waddell also received support from a number of her fellow members of Bachelor Nation.
“You’re a good mom and you’re a good human and don’t believe that everybody’s life needs to look a certain way, needs to follow a certain order or needs to ‘follow the rules,’” former Bachelorette Jillian Harris wrote in the Instagram comments section.
“Not settling and striving for the best for you and your kids. You should be proud of that!!!”
Waddell revealed in March 2024 that she started dating Tressler one year earlier.
“My TV was on mute in the middle of last year and this man came on being interviewed on the midday news about his business. I stopped in my tracks,” she recalled via Instagram at the time. “t wasn’t just that I found him handsome. There was something about his smile and the way he carried himself, even when I couldn’t hear his voice.”
She added, “For weeks I couldn’t stop thinking about this mystery man. I told all my friends who of course told me to reach out to him somehow, and I just couldn’t make myself do it. Out of fear, I suppose. I finally looked him up, and after a few too many glasses of wine, slid into his DMs.”
Tressler responded to Waddell’s message and asked her out for a date. Waddell later proposed to Tressler in October 2023. He popped the question to her the next year.
“A little thing happened in Costa Rica 💍,” Waddell wrote via Instagram in October 2024. “Many of y’all have been wondering why Todd wears a ring on his hand and it is actually because I asked him last Halloween to marry me first! SPOILER ALERT, he said yes, even though to be honest he was so shocked it was hard for him to be! Then, also SPOILER ALERT he asked me THIS October and I also said YES!!!!”