Meet Ethan And Olivia Plath — Details About How The 'Welcome To Plathville' Couple Met
It wasn't love at first sight.
YouTube TLC fans have enjoyed getting to know the Plaths, a Georgia family with 9 kids who live on a 55-acre farm where they can be on their own "slice of heaven."
The family featured on Welcome to Plathville proudly tells audiences that television and the internet are strictly limited in their home.
Parents Kim and Barry are trying to keep their kids sheltered from outside influences that go against their fundamentalist Christain values.
But even religious kids grow up and go their own way — and that's what's happening with Ethan Plath. Twenty-two-year-old Ethan got married a year ago to Olivia.
How did Ethan and Olivia Plath meet?
Olivia and Ethan originally met at a Christian family event called the Smokey Mountain No Greater Joy Shindig in 2014, when they would have been about 16 or 17 years old.
Fans of the Duggars may already know about the No Greater Joy Ministries, as that TLC family is involved in their activities.
This is a controversial fundamentalist organization founded by Michael and Debi Pearl.
They are best known for their book To Train Up A Child, which conservative Christian families consider a handbook for parenting but which some people say encourages abusive practices that been implicated in the deaths of multiple children.
Their ministry organizes events that are popular among Christian families, including the one the Plaths and Olivia's family attended in the summer of 2014.
Olivia wrote about the event at length in her now-defunct blog "The Meggs Family". She didn't mention Ethan by name in her post about the event but she did note that the Plaths were there and she used some photos they shared in her write up for the camp.
What is Olivia Plath's maiden name?
Olivia was born Olivia Marie Meggs and she is currently 22 years old. She grew up in rural Virginia, as one of ten siblings, according to her now-defunct family blog.
She has her own photography business and she specializes in weddings, particularly weddings that allow her to travel.
Her family is also conservative and Christian, though not as extreme as the Plath family, and she also grew up on a farm, doing chores like milking cows and caring for goats.
Was it love at first sight?
On their wedding website, Olivia says Ethan didn't make a huge impression on her at the Shindig event, saying, "[W]e didn't even really spend any time together, except for dancing a few times together in the evenings."
However, once Ethan got home, he kept thinking about Olivia and decided he was interested in her.
In addition, there may have been something going on at the event.
"Olivia, on the other hand, became more and more determined *not* to like Ethan because everyone teased her about dancing with him more than any other guy at the camp," she wrote.
Apparently her family saw something between them before she did.
Their families hung out together before they were a couple.
Olivia and Ethan's wedding website says that they started dating long-distance in December 2016 but they had seen each other before that.
In a blog post, Olivia talks about visiting with the Plath family for a week and absolutely loving hanging out with all of them.
"These are… my people," she gushed after the visit.
"What a crammed week we spent with them, indulging in quality time, late night shenanigans, sharing testimonies, dancing and reeling, washing dishes, hiking, playing music and talking and laughing galore … and then some more!"
Her photos of the visit focus mainly on picture of Ethan's sisters, so if the two of them were paying one another any attention, Olivia was keeping it pretty quiet at that point.
They dated long-distance for over a year.
They started out writing letters to each other, which Olivia says made getting to know each other "more intentional."
While letters, as opposed to texts and emails, sound sweet and romantic, that choice was probably because of the ways Kim and Barry restricted technology for their kids.
Ethan might not have had his own phone or email account to have private communication with Olivia at that point.
She, meanwhile, was using the internet to advertise her business and she had been blogging for several years.
Once they were face to face, they both fell in love.
They were both working by this point in their relationship, Olivia as a photographer with a busy travel schedule and Ethan as a mechanic.
After several months, Olivia managed to carve out two weeks to go visit Ethan and his family in Georgia where they finally had their first date.
"Over dinner and lots of conversation," their wedding website says, "Olivia finally realized what Ethan had known for several years ... we were made for each other!"
The courtship moved quickly after that, and in November of 2017, Ethan proposed. He took her back to the same place they had their first date and got down on one knee to pop the question.
Unlike the Duggars, who make big productions of their proposals, the Plath family doesn't seem to have a video of the big moment.
Olivia has posted lots of photos of their wedding on her Instagram page, however. The couple looks over the moon in the pictures.
How are things for the couple now?
It's not clear if Olivia knew she was signing up to be on a TLC show when she joined the Plath family.
If we had to guess, we would say the contracts weren't signed before she and Ethan got married because TLC is always happy to put a wedding into a show.
The fact that they didn't probably means they weren't working with the family yet. Ethan and Olivia were major figures on the first season of Welcome to Plathville.
They show didn't feature the growing pains of learning to live together as a married couple.
Instead, it focused on the ways the less-conservative Olivia butted heads with Ethan's very restrictive parents.
She enjoys things like wine and secular music and wearing bathing suits at the beach. Ethan's siblings Moriah, 17, and Micah, 19 enjoy those things, too, and Olivia is more than happy to share experiences like that with the teens.
Kim and Barry Plath were pretty upset about it and as a result, the relationship between the two couples was strained on the show.
Now, Katie Joy of the YouTube channel "Without A Crystal Ball" says that Ethan barely speaks to his mother now that filming is over and the young couple is more distant from the family than they have ever been.
When does Welcome to Plathville season 2 premiere?
Season 2 of Welcome to Plathville premieres on TLC on Tuesday, Nov. 10 at 10 p.m. ET.
Rebekah Kuschmider has been writing about celebrities, pop culture, entertainment, and politics since 2010. She is the creator of the blog FeminXer and she is a cohost of the weekly podcast The More Perfect Union.