Arie Luyendyk Jr. and Lauren Luyendyk (née Burnham) are one of the rare Bachelor couples still going strong, recently renewing their vows to prove it.
“We were not planning to renew our vows so early, but we heard about the Aruba I Do event, and we thought it was really cool and a fun opportunity for us to bring our kids with us and just have fun on the beach, celebrating love. So that’s what we did,” Lauren told Us Weekly during a joint interview with Arie. “It was such a good time. We got to see couples that had been married for, like, 60 years to people who had just gotten married earlier that year or this year.”
Lauren noted that the duo, who met on season 22 of The Bachelor, want to have another wedding for their 10-year anniversary after exchanging vows with “hundreds of other couples” at the same time at the Aruba event.
“It took the pressure off of us,” Arie explained of the group vow renewal. “I actually wrote vows and so did Lauren, but it was orchestrated at the same time.”
The couple took 4-year-old daughter Alessi and 2-year-old twins Senna and Lux to Aruba’s Eagle Beach for the “epic” ceremony, which Arie described as a “fun event to celebrate love.”
“I loved that our kids were there too. They had the best time. There were dancers from the island there and they had these crazy costumes and Lux was just, like, enamored with these dancers,” Lauren told Us. “[Lux] just, like, could not get over it. It was so fun.”
Arie and Lauren originally wed in January 2019. When informed about the “reality TV curse” — a.k.a. the idea that Real Housewives or other reality stars find themselves getting divorced after vow renewals — they laughed.
“I started hearing that when we said that we did our vow renewal. Someone was like, ‘Ashley and J.P. did a vow renewal … oh no, now you guys are doomed,’” Lauren said of Bachelorette season 7 stars Ashley Hebert and J.P. Rosenbaum, who renewed their vows in August 2018, two years before they announced their split. “I’m like, ‘I don’t think it works that way.’”
Arie agreed. “Maybe some couples do [a renewal] as, like, a last-ditch effort to repair the relationship, but it’s not like that for us,” he said. “I think we just love love. I mean, we’ve been married [to each other] twice now. We’ve done two [proposals].”
Lauren is confident that the twosome have only grown as a unit.
“My mentality, at least going into the vow renewal, was, ‘We got married and it was the most magical day of our lives. We had all these ideas of what our future was gonna be.’ And then after we had our kids, like, things get harder, we go through different trials together,” she said. “Our relationship’s not always perfect. So it’s fun to kind of come back together and be like, ‘Hey, we still love each other and we got through all these things together and we’re still strong and we have like an amazing future ahead of us.’ And that was that’s what that was for us.”
Arie concluded, “The vows that you write each other when you first get married are so different. Your life is so different after having kids. So I think the vows change too. And I think it is just a nice way to celebrate your love and also kind of reset your expectations for one another.”
