Welcome to Plathville’s Olivia and Ethan Plath are ending their marriage.
In separate Instagram posts on Friday, the couple shared the announcement with their followers.
“Olivia and I have parted ways,” Ethan shared in his post. “It just didn’t work between us, though Lord knows we both gave it all we had. It seemed we were constantly pulling each other in opposite directions in life with different goals. I wish Olivia the best in the future ahead. I care for her deeply and always will.”
Ethan has since updated his Instagram bio to no longer include Olivia’s Instagram handle.
In Olivia’s post, she confirmed the split and then briefly reflected on their time together.
“I have ambivalent memories of us being 18 years old, innocently dreaming of forever — but the partner you choose is a reflection of the world you want to live in, and at 18 I didn’t know who I was or what kind of life I wanted to create for myself,” she wrote.
“7 years later, I’ve already begun my journey of questioning, deconstructing and rebuilding and I know that is a process that I will continue to prioritize throughout my life,” she concluded. “Thank you for the good times, Ethan. I wish the best for you.”
At the beginning of the current season of the TLC hit, Ethan and Olivia, both 25, appeared to be stronger than ever following a summer spent in Europe. As winter 2022 approached, they were optimistic about their future as they readied for a move to Minnesota and away from Ethan’s immediate family in the South with whom they’d become estranged.
But as Christmas arrived, Ethan and Olivia’s marriage appeared strained. The young couple agreed that they no longer saw eye-to-eye on things like religion and politics.
“I’ve changed a lot since I got married, and I think that’s okay,” Olivia said in this week’s episode. “I have doubts sometimes, but I also think that I’m capable of being in a relationship with someone who believes different than me. I think that’s something that I ask Ethan all the time, is if he’s capable of it.”
“I am not tolerant of some of the beliefs you have, and you are not tolerant of some of the beliefs I have,” Ethan says in a preview for upcoming episodes. “Going along to get along: That’s a recipe for a miserable life. I don’t want that.”
This isn’t the first time Olivia and Ethan, both 25, have separated publicly. After they wed in 2018, the pair took some time apart. On the series in 2021, the couple admitted they were searching for space as they evaluated the future of their marriage. Olivia decided it was best to move out of their shared home at the time.
“I don’t know what will happen,” she said on an episode of Welcome to Plathville. “I was trying so hard to, like, make the marriage work. But I just realized that as long as I stayed and kind of kept Ethan’s world together, he was able to just ignore everything that was happening.”
The couple ended up reuniting after their brief relationship hiatus, and expressed their renewed love publicly. “When high school sweethearts find each other there isn’t much that can separate us,” Ethan wrote in an Instagram post in September 2022.
In this week’s episode, Olivia looked back on their trial separation. “I don’t think of it as like independent or free or single or figuring life out on my own at all,” she says. “I just remember intense pain, but my mindset was this is going to have to work out. But I think I’m in a very different place in my life, and I think I would feel very different today.”
She adds: “The more I deconstruct all the beliefs around marriage that I was taught growing up, the more I feel kind of confused about what should I expect out of a relationship?”
Ethan and Olivia have previously disagreed on a handful of topics throughout their marriage — including everything from Ethan’s love of buying cars, to the dynamics of his reality TV family.
In this week’s episode, Olivia also admitted to her sister, Lydia Grace Meggs, that she questioned on her wedding day if she’d regret being married to Ethan, “but, to be honest, it was mostly because of his family.”
Fans began to speculate that Ethan and Olivia may have split sometime in early 2023 due to the lack of presence on each other’s social media. The last time Olivia shared a post with Ethan on Instagram was in November 2022, though it appears to have been deleted, and his last ode to his wife was on Jan. 8.
Most notably, Ethan reunited with his siblings — after estrangement from his parents — in March, while on a road trip to bring his classic cars from Florida to Minnesota. Olivia did not appear to be on the trip.
Welcome to Plathville airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET on TLC.
