Dean Unglert and Caelynn Miller-Keyes’ love story has been unconventional from the start — and his feelings about the word “love” are no different.
While playing a game on his “Help! I Suck at Dating” podcast with Jared Haibon, the 30-year-old Bachelorette season 13 alum revealed he made up a new phrase to avoid the L-word.
“She calls me Maka, but that’s, like, something that I made up and then she ran with it,” he said. “I just hate saying the L-word word, so I was like, ‘Let’s make up a different word, so we don’t have to say that to each other all the time.’”
Haibon, 32, went on to compare his costar to Patrick Swayze in Ghost, who tells Demi Moore’s Molly “ditto” when her character confesses her love in the 1990 movie.
“Yeah, [Maka] was, like, for love because he can’t say love but then it just became a name we call each other,” Miller-Keyes, 26, added.
Unglert and Miller-Keyes met while filming season 6 of Bachelor in Paradise in 2019. After briefly breaking up on the beach, the twosome celebrated their two-year anniversary earlier this summer.
“My birthday was on [June 15] and Dean dumped me on my birthday two years ago. He came back five days later, so our anniversary is June 20,” the jewelry designer told Us in June. “It’s kind of like a week of celebrating, my birthday into the anniversary.”
She added that the pair “definitely defied the odds” when it comes to their romance.
“It’s funny, I don’t think a single person thought we were going to last and even we were like, ‘No, I don’t know what’s going to happen here,’” Miller-Keyes explained. “I think that’s just our unique relationship and we really try not to listen to it. When you go on the show, so many people are going to have so many opinions about your relationship — good and bad. I think we just never really listened to those negative people and we just lived our lives.”
While he faced criticism from viewers for opting to live in a van and not settle down with Miller-Keyes, the couple have since bought a house together outside of Las Vegas. She also told Us that he’s a great partner to her.
“Something that actually really frustrates me is that [some] people think Dean, like, isn’t a great boyfriend,” Miller-Keyes told Us. “He is hilarious and he’s very sarcastic and he’s also the most romantic person I think I’ve ever met. He’s so thoughtful. So I think that’s a big misconception — that I’m, like, more invested in the relationship or he, like, doesn’t treat me right. I’m like, ‘No, he treats me exceptionally well and he’s always going out of his way to just surprise me and do romantic things.’”
