Monique Samuels SPILLS THE TEA on How Reality TV BROKE UP Her Marriage with Chris Samuels!
Monique Samuels SPILLS THE TEA on How Reality TV BROKE UP Her Marriage with Chris Samuels!
Real Housewives of Potomac alum, Monique Samuels, is opening up about her divorce from Chris Samuels and how living in the reality TV spotlight affected their marriage.
“I would say that reality TV played a role in me waking up to who I am, and it was like the blinders were completely off and removed,” Monique told Washington D.C. outlet, Fox 5, when asked if filming the show played a role in the demise of her marriage.
The former Love and Marriage D.C. star added that the ex-couple “had to deal with one issue after another,” including making the decision to leave the world of reality TV.
“I did not want to maintain this toxic environment that I had signed up for,” Monique explained. “So once you start ridding yourself of things that don’t serve you, it does spill off into your home as well. It starts exposing everything that you’ve been ignoring, and I started to realize the illusion I had created, even within my marriage.”
Monique Samuels added that she realized that she needed something “different,” as she was not the same person as when the pair got married.
She said — “And it wasn’t fair for me to try to force my then husband to just be everything that I wanted him to be because then now he’s not able to live a life that’s then happy for himself.”
Monique Samuels joined the RHOP cast in 2017 for Season 2 and left the show in June, 2020. Monique exited the series over her explosive altercation with co-star, Candiace Dillard-Bassett, which was featured during Season 5. She later put Bravo on blast for treating her “less than human,” ahead of the Season 6 premiere.
She and Chris, a former NFL player, filed for divorce in June 2023, after a ten-year marriage. They share three children together.
The couple’s rocky marriage was highlighted on the first season of Love & Marriage: DC — which aired in early 2022. Monique told fans, via a YouTube video, that the duo’s marital woes were the result of “a lot of confusion [and] crazy building up to that 10-year marker of our marriage.”
“When you’ve been married that long and when you have things that you’re like, ‘Listen, this is being unmet or I’ve been unheard’ you start to get frustrated and it’s like, ‘Oh, my God, is this what life is going to be? I can’t take it anymore,’” she shared. “So what y’all saw on ‘Love & Marriage: DC’ last season, it was my cry for help.”
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Avigail is an Entertainment blogger at All About The Tea, who specializes in The Real Housewives of Atlanta and The Real Housewives of Potomac. Avigail has a background in marketing. She’s a Brooklynite living in the Bahamas, with a passion for travel, writing, reality TV watching, pop culture and spoken word.