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Hunted newlyweds reveal how the show impacted their relationship
Not only were Nick and Lavinia the only romantic pair to compete on this year’s season of Hunted, but they were also the only team who went on the run just a few weeks before their wedding.
Chatting with Yahoo Lifestyle following their elimination, the Bondi couple spoke openly about their time on the reality show and how it affected their relationship so close to getting married.
“It was a huge risk,” Lavinia admits. “It could have definitely impacted our relationship for the worse, but it was definitely for the better. We learned a lot about ourselves and each other and we just worked so well as a team, even more so than I thought we would.
“It was really nice to be able to rely on each other and have each other's back and I think it just made us really proud of each other.”
“It was the best thing that we could have done before our wedding,” Nick agrees. “I’d never been more sure and more excited to spend the rest of my life with Lavinia.”
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While they’d love to do the adventure all over again, they reveal that one of the toughest parts was actually returning home and trying to overcome the paranoia while getting ready for their wedding.
“It was a pretty intense week,” Nick shares.
“The week leading up to the wedding was actually maybe worse than the last week on the run,” Lavinia adds. “There was so much to manage on top of being emotionally drained from weeks of being terrified of any black car you pass. I still freak out when I see a black MG!”
‘Incredibly hard’
Speaking about how they prepared themselves for Hunted, Nick explains that he focused on running and fitness training while Lavinia did plenty of mental preparation.
“It was incredibly hard to get ready because you need to think about everything,” he details.
“If you're going on a hike, you go online, you go to Amazon and you buy maps. But you can't do that here because if you buy a map, the Hunters would know exactly what area you’re going to. You can’t Google things without them being traced, so it’s hard to prepare. So we decided not to have a plan and be okay with whatever came our way.”
The pair went on to say that one of their favourite parts of the experience was having the Hunters underestimate them because of their appearance and lifestyle.
“That was, I guess in many ways, to be expected,” Nick says. “We just thought we’d turn everything to our advantage and if they wanted to sort of undermine us and think that we were ‘bougie’, then we were happy for them to think that while we went camping.”
“It was a bit of a thrill each time they said, ‘They won't be able to do it tough, they'll be struggling’, and then it would cut to us in the middle of the bush roughing it,” Lavinia laughs.
“I felt pretty chuffed seeing that because they made assumptions and that ultimately led to them not being able to get a thing on us for 13 days.”
‘If I could change anything…’
As for regrets, Nick says that he wishes he could go back and have more fun messing around with the Hunters.
“I know it sounds really counterintuitive, but I think if I could change anything I would have had more interaction and more misinformation towards the Hunters, just because you need to train yourself to deal with them being close and having it on your own terms,” he explains.
“When you’ve spent two weeks without seeing them, you get really confident with yourself,” Lavinia adds. “You think ‘Oh it’s been two weeks, we’ve nailed this, they have nothing on us’, but you’d get to the finish line and they would just pop up out of nowhere and you wouldn’t expect it.
“You definitely run the risk of getting caught way earlier, but if you make it through, it’s going to put you in a good place for the extraction on the final day.”
Hunted airs 7:30pm Sunday – Tuesday on Channel 10.
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