Hallmark’s Nikki DeLoach Has ‘No Marriage Advice’ After 15 Year Union

Longtime Hallmark star Nikki DeLoach has mastered playing characters falling in love onscreen. But when it comes to staying in love and staying happy in a marriage, the actress and screenwriter feels unqualified to offer anyone advice.

In an interview with Swooon on November 1, 2024 — ahead of the premiere of her latest Hallmark romcom, “Our Holiday Story” co-starring Warren Christie — DeLoach said that despite being married for 15 years to former boy band singer and current entertainment lawyer Ryan Goodell since 2009, she feels like she can’t give others advice because she only knows what works in her own union.

“I always say to people I have no marriage advice,” she told the outet. “I don’t know what a successful marriage looks like. I just know what my marriage is like because I’m in it, and everybody’s so different.”

Nikki DeLoach Says She Loves Her Husband More Each Year

Explaining how she and Goodell have weathered storms in their marriage, including their youngest son requiring three heart surgeries, DeLoach told Swooon, ““It’s a choice that we make every day when we wake up next to the person that we’re married to and the person that we love, and it’s a choice that we have to make of like, I accept you, I love you, you are mine. Let’s do this.”

“I’ve been married to my husband for 15 years and have been together 25 years,” DeLoach added, “and the only thing I can share is I just wake up each day, and I choose him, and then we get through that day together.”

On September 5, DeLoach marked the couple’s 15th anniversary by posting a photo from their wedding, sharing how grateful she is for walking through life with Goodell.

“We’ve known better and worse,” she wrote. “We’ve had years where we didn’t know how we would make rent, but together, we always figured it out. And we’ve always been rich in love, family, friends and community. We’ve faced sickness. And we’ve experienced the miracle of healing and good health. And through it all, I have loved you more with each passing year. Happy Anniversary, babe. I love you so much.”

DeLoach and Goodell met when they were teens working in the entertainment industry in Orlando. She was part of the “Mickey Mouse Club” alongside future music superstars like Justin Timberlake (still one of her besties) and Christina Aguilera, and later joined a world-touring girl group called Innosense — a time fraught with uncertainty and financial woes, she told The Retaility in 2023. Goodell, meanwhile, was part of the boy band Take 5.

The two decided to move together to Los Angeles where she enrolled in community college and he began law school, she told the outlet. Ten years after they began dating, they married in 2009.

“I believe that love is something that grows, I do,” she told Parade in 2019. “I also, by the way, was never a person who enjoyed dating. For me, I was more of a let-me-get-to-know-you-a-little-bit person and then maybe let’s go get dinner.”

Nikki DeLoach Loved Portraying a Married Woman in ‘Our Holiday Story’

Hallmark HallmarkNikki DeLoach and Warren Christie in Hallmark Channel’s “Our Holiday Story”

Though many of DeLoach’s romcom roles on Hallmark have portrayed her as a single woman falling in love, she loved playing an already-married woman navigating her relationship in her newest Hallmark movie, “Our Holiday Story.”

She and Christie play a married couple — Nell and Dave — with flashbacks to their life years earlier, when their relationship was beginning. She told Swooon that she loved having the chance to remind viewers of the layered experiences and personal choices that go into making a good marriage last.

“I think what moved me the most about their love story is the fact that you see them in the present day,” DeLoach told the outlet, “so you know that of all these years being married and assuming the best of each other and accepting each other for who you know you are and I am, that part of it, that’s a choice.”

DeLoach wrote on Instagram that it was “a joy…to make on and off screen.” The movie is scheduled to re-air on Hallmark Channel on November 8 at 9 p.m. Eastern time.