Who Is Chris Harrison's Girlfriend? Everything To Know About Lauren Zima
They have been together since 2018.
DFree / Shutterstock Finding love on the set of The Bachelor is not a sure thing. Dozens of hopefuls go home every season, a little more famous but just as single as when they began. Not everyone ends up disappointed, however — and we don't just mean the contestants on the dating show. Some of the people who work on the series have found love on camera as well, including Bachelor host Chris Harrison and his girlfriend Lauren Zima.
Harrison took to social media this week to wish a happy two year anniversary to Lauren Zima. He and the Entertainment Tonight correspondent who cover Bachelor Nation met at work several years ago and fell in love in 2018. Now they're in quarantine together. There is even video of her giving him a Covid-haircut, with the help of a celebrity stylist on video chat, of course.
Who is Chris Harrison's girlfriend, Lauren Zima?
Zima's from the Midwest.
Zima, who is 33, hails from Elgin Township in Illinois and she stayed in the Heartland for college as well. She went to the University of Missouri where she got her degree in journalism.
Zima did some wild things at the start of her career.
She moved to Los Angeles around 2010 to work in the entertainment field and like a lot of Hollywood hopefuls, took gigs that seem a little ridiculous in hindsight. In Zima's case, she was on a show called Disaster Date on MTV. The premise of the show was people would set their friends up on what they thought was a legitimate blind date. In reality, they would be going out with an actor who would make the date as awful as possible. The unwitting participants would earn a dollar for every minute they stayed on the date, with a maximum of $60 in prize money. Zima was one of the undercover actors in 2011 and she participated in 18 episodes of the early reality show.
Zima's early LA days were tough for her.
While resumé experiences like Disaster Date are funny to talk about, Zima actually remembers her early days in LA as a very tragic time. She moved there just after the unexpected death of her father. "About six months after my dad died 10 years ago, I moved to Los Angeles to pursue my dreams. I probably went too soon after that sudden, shocking loss. But it had been my plan, and I didn’t think my dad would want me to change it. So I went to LA, where I did not know a single soul," she writes on Instagram.
"Looking back, I wasn’t myself. When I tried to meet new people and make new friends, I was always hiding my raw, deep pain right under the surface, and was still processing so much. I learned if I told people too soon after meeting them, they became uncomfortable. I don’t blame them for not knowing what to say but I started saying less, and bottling things up more. I write all this to share that I learned a big lesson: we never really know what someone else is going through. As we all engage on social media, and especially lately as some of us debate, it’s something I try to remember. The person on the other end of the screen could’ve experienced or be experiencing loss, illness, trauma or other hardship you know nothing about. So, I try to come with love."
Zima and her dad before his death.
Zima moved into journalistic jobs after her time with MTV.
A season of playing the role of a terrible date was enough for the aspiring journalist and she found her way into entertainment media after that. She worked as a host and creative director at Newsy before getting hired at Entertainment Tonight in 2015. She has carved out a role for herself there covering Bachelor Nation.
Lauren Zima and Chris Harrison started dating in 2018.
The couple didn't tell anyone at the time but Zima and Harrison started dating in the summer of 2018. Harrison had been divorced from his first wife, Gwen Harrison, since 2012 and wasn't sure he was ever going to get into a serious relationship again. But they met at work and found they had a lot in common, even apart from their mutual love of the Bachelor franchise. "It’s been easy and I think that’s how it all starts,” Harrison told reporters. “We started dating and like any relationship, she made me happy. She was kind, nice, we got along, she blended in great with my friends, and just all those steps in the relationship where you start checking those boxes off and it gets better and better and better.”
Zima and Harrison took their relationship public in 2019 when they first appeared on a red carpet together.
Zima and Harrison are quarantining together.
These days, the happy couple has been staying at home together during the COVID-19 quarantine. The crisis seems to be bringing them closer together, as evidenced from one of Zima's Instagram posts where she explained that they ended up in matching outfits without planning it. They are also doing broadcasts together to talk about Bachelor-related topics and Zima even did a cute segment for ET where she let celebrity hairstylist Chris Appleton guide her through giving Harrison a quarantine haircut at home, which you can view above. It actually turned out pretty well, if she ever wants to change careers.
They share the same taste in outfits.
Harrison has headed out to film the new season of the Bachelorette in Palm Springs and no one is coming in or out of the set to keep both spoilers and Covid contained. Zima used social media to wish him a long-distance happy birthday, saying "I love you, I miss you — and I love that I miss you. Thank you for being the amazing man you are. Happy Birthday."
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.