Jamie Otis has no regrets about being “married at first sight.”
The nurse, who appeared on the first season of the Lifetime series Married at First Sight in 2014, married Doug Hehner having only met him for the first time at their wedding. The two went on to appear on the spin-off Married at First Sight: The First Year, and currently share two children: daughter Henley, 4, and son Hendrix, 2.
In a March 22 Instagram post, Otis shared a video of herself and Hehner dancing while on their beach vacation, noting that the couple is celebrating their 8th anniversary.
She began the caption of her post, “We were on season 1 of Married At First Sight. They all laughed and mocked us when we said, ‘I do’ as complete strangers. Back then no one had ever done it before. (I literally didn’t even know my hubby’s name until our wedding day sooo maybe they had valid reason to call us cray cray!?!) lol! But that’s the thing about society norms – they can really hold ya back.”
She added, “If I had listened to everyone’s criticism and never followed my heart I would’ve missed out on growing a love like I’ve never known.”
Otis — who is the author of Wifey 101: Everything I Got Wrong After Finding Mr. Right — shared that despite how well everything turned out, she wasn’t always confident in the fact that she had “legally committed my life to a complete stranger who I wasn’t even attracted to,” sharing that she had a “full blown panic attack” on the day of her wedding. She joked, “crying on the floor trying to hide my my tears with a translucent veil was prob not my best moment in life.”
Ultimately, she went through with it because she “desperately wanted a family.”
Now, Otis teased, that family may be expanding. She shared that she and Hehner’s trip goal is to add “two more baby feet” to their family of four and that if they get their way, “we’re gonna leave here preggers.”
“I was hoping to already be pregnant so on our road trip (we leave April 1st!!!!) across America id be out of the first trimester and into the second, but at this point, I’ll deal w the first trimester nausea on the road,” she continued. “If we have to cut the trip short it’d be worth it!!!”
Otis previously shared that the couple wasn’t trying too hard to have a third baby after welcoming Hendrix in May 2020. In an August 2021 Instagram pic, she wrote, “We’ve kinda put trying for our next baby on the back burner while we focus on strengthening our marriage.”
She added, “It’s not like we are preventing it, but we aren’t scheduling and going at it as aggressively as we were a couple months back. So we are trying, but not trying if that makes sense. I just know in my heart I am supposed to have more children. I genuinely don’t feel like our family is complete yet. It’s hard to explain, but I have this really strong feeling that I’m meant to have more children living on earth and being part of this little family we’ve created.”
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