Nick Viall's Fiancée Is So Young, He 'Carded' Her Before They Hooked Up!

Well, this is pretty gross. Not since Billy Ray Cyrus has a cutesy story about meeting and falling in love felt so inadvertently sketchy…

In case you didn’t hear, Bachelor vet Nick Viall got engaged in January to girlfriend Natalie Joy after nearly three years together. On the one hand we can see it being viewed as a beautiful story of soul mates finding one another. On the other, well… there’s the age gap that makes it feel a lot ickier. There’s a full 18 years between Nick and Natalie, meaning he’s old enough to be her dad. In fact the 42-year-old admitted this week that his future wife was so young when they met that he “carded” her before they could get romantic!

The couple appeared on Wednesday’s episode of The Squeeze podcast to talk about their relationship — and the minor controversy surrounding it. Nick admitted that when he first met Natalie in 2019 — when she would have been just 21 years old — she looked so young to him he made sure to see some legal identification! He recalled:

“We started messaging, and I carded her.”

It wasn’t a joke! She confirmed this really happened, saying:

“He was like, ‘I want to see your ID.'”

Just so we’re all on the same page here — he was about 39 at the time but couldn’t be sure whether this girl he was looking at was over 18 years old or not. He was worried about her being “jailbait.” That’s messed up.

He went on to say that even though she proved she wasn’t a minor, he did still tell her they “would never date” because “the age for me was something I was self conscious about.”

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Does he mean it felt bad in his conscience? Or that he was worried about how it would look for him, a celeb, to be dating such a younger woman? Because “self-conscious” implies the latter more than the former… Anyway, he wasn’t too self-conscious, obviously. They started dating in 2020, and the rest is history. He remembers:

“She slid into my DMs. We messaged for a couple of weeks. We met up in New York. I think we were both thinking the other person was a little crazy. We kind of both knew we’d end up spending the weekend together. I think we were both pretty guarded.”

The way Natalie tells it, she knew they were meant to be from jump street, before they were ever even an item:

“I knew after that weekend, I was like, ‘I’m going to spend the rest of my life with this man.’ And I knew it and he didn’t. So I was like, ‘I’m just going to hang on because he’ll come around.’ So I asked him several times to date me.”

It sounds like Nick was still “self-conscious” even after spending a weekend with Natalie! Oops! Well, it all worked out for them anyway — clearly, since they’re getting hitched now.

But how does the now-24-year-old surgical technologist feel about how internet commenters react to their age gap? That still hurts apparently:

“It’s definitely weird to have so many people give you their opinions… DMs of mean comments about [how] I’m a ‘child bride’ … just terrible, terrible things people would call me.”

Frankly, it sounds like Nick was one of those judgy people, too! But he got over it!