The Bachelor alum Carly Waddell is finally ready to introduce the world to her new boyfriend, Todd Allen Tressler.
“My TV was on mute in the middle of last year and this man came on being interviewed on the midday news about his business. I stopped in my tracks,” Waddell, 38, wrote via Instagram on Thursday, March 14, while reflecting on meeting her new boyfriend. “It wasn’t just that I found him handsome. There was something about his smile and the way he carried himself, even when I couldn’t hear his voice (which is very deep and southern by the way).”
The Bachelor Nation alum recalled having the instinct to remember Tressler’s name as she stepped away to get her son Charlie, 3, a snack. (Waddell shares Charlie and daughter Bella, 5, with ex-husband Evan Bass, whom she met on Bachelor in Paradise.)
“For weeks I couldn’t stop thinking about this mystery man. I told all my friends who of course told me to reach out to him somehow, and I just couldn’t make myself do it. Out of fear, I suppose,” she explained on Thursday. “I finally looked him up, and after a few too many glasses of wine, slid into his DMs.”
Waddell shared that Tressler does not watch The Bachelor and initially thought his friends “were playing a trick on him” at first. However, he ultimately decided to follow Waddell back and liked some of her videos with her two kids, which eased some of Waddell’s insecurities about being a single mom in the dating world.
“I in turn liked something of his before saying, ‘So are just gonna keep liking each other’s stuff?’ He told me he was old school and would love to call me sometime,” she said. “I asked him out in the most awkward voice text ever that I thought would never send and then it [accidentally] did. He laughed and accepted.”
The pair went on a date and Waddell confessed to her mom that the duo’s outing was “magic” and that she would “forever measure every other date” to the experience. Despite forming a strong connection, Waddell revealed that she had chosen to exclude Tressler from her social media at first so she and her children could form bonds with him.
“So here’s what I have been up to all year. Loving my loveable lawyer who also told me that I taught him what real love is, and he has done the same for me ❤️,” she concluded. “@tat_two (I was gonna soft launch … but here we are … I always do things a little differently [than] I probably should 🤣).”
Waddell teased she was seeing someone in November 2023.
“He’s older than me,” Waddell said during an appearance on “The Ben and Ashley I Almost Famous Podcast. “He’s literally everything I’ve ever wanted in a human.”
After her divorce from Bass, 41, in 2020, Waddell was hesitant to begin putting herself out there but things could change if she came across the right person.
“I have this fantasy that one day I’m just gonna be out walking around and I’m gonna meet this, like, wonderful man and he is just going to wow me,” she exclusively told Us Weekly on the May 2023 episode of the “Here for the Right Reasons” podcast. “That’s in my brain. I’m manifesting that for myself.”
