Dhruv Trivedi
Netflix’s reality drama offering ‘Marriage or Mortgage’ puts couples in a dilemma between choosing the wedding of their dreams or the house of their dreams. With limited savings to spend on one of the two, 10 Nashville couples are taken on a whirlwind tour of potential houses and wedding setups that their money can get them. In the end, they have to pick whether they’ll go with realty agent Nichole Holmes and put a downpayment on the house of their dreams or hire wedding planner Sarah Miller to have the wedding they always wanted.
The show highlights that couples from all walks of life undergo the same dilemma, and episode 4 of ‘Marriage or Mortgage’ tells the story of Cynthia Andrews-Looper and Karla Hudgens, a late-life lesbian couple who have finally found love in each other and want to celebrate it. Flamboyant and outspoken, this couple is one of the more striking ones of the show, and if you’d like to know more about them, we’ve got you covered!
Cynthia and Karla: Marriage or Mortgage Journey
At the time of their episode’s filming, Cynthia and Karla had been engaged for 2 months but had known each other for a long time. Cynthia, a pastor at an LGBTQ church in Nashville, actually performed the wedding ceremony of Karla and her ex-partner, which is how they met. Having both come from unfulfilling relationships, they found the perfect match in each other and wanted to have a “big fat gay wedding” to celebrate their love and inspire their friends, family, and community.
There was just one caveat: they lived in the house that Karla had shared with her ex, and both felt uneasy about it despite trying to move past it. So, getting a space of their own was important too. Karla, who had already been married once, was slightly less excited about the prospect of a wedding, whereas Cynthia, who has performed many weddings but had never been married herself, was very excited about it. In the end, they decided to get married instead of paying the downpayment for a new house.
Where Are Cynthia and Karla Now?
After having to reschedule their wedding 4 times due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they finally had their wedding on October 17, 2020, at the East Ivy Mansion in Nashville with a lot of safety precautions in place. To allow for social distancing without hampering the fun, the wedding setup allowed people to dance not just on the dance floor but almost anywhere else in the venue too if they wished.
Karla and Cynthia still live in the same house outside Nashville in Gallatin, Tennessee, and have started making it into more of a home for themselves. They have also adopted 2 dogs which feature a lot in their pictures and seem to have become a part of the family. In fact, Karla and Cynthia consider the dogs – Bentley and Chloe – their babies and treat them as such.
Cynthia remains involved in multiple churches and institutions of faith that help the LGBTQ community, including the Rise Up Community Church and the Ignite Your Soul Now Ministries (which she founded). She also keeps busy performing weddings in and around Nashville. Karla continues to work as a medical imaging technician and leads a private life.
A comical incident that fans of the show will appreciate occurred when Karla decided to put up additional shelving space in their house’s spare bedroom that Cynthia uses partly as her office and partly to keep her clothes in. Viewers of the show ‘Marriage or Mortgage’ might remember both Cynthia and Karla adamantly saying at the beginning of their episode that they are not “hands-on” people. This became abundantly clear with the shelves, as Cynthia noticed that they were barely fixed to the wall, and one of them was also crooked.
A few days later, with a huge crashing sound that scared the wits out of Cynthia and the dogs, both shelves collapsed. Cynthia has now decided to upgrade her “butch” skills and become more hands-on. She mentions her visit to Lowe’s Home Improvement, where she stocked up on materials and power tools and is working on her fixing skills; as she says on her Facebook post, “our yard is going to be jacked up, our walls are gonna be full of holes, and the house is gonna burn down!” Hopefully, the beautiful, happily married couple will figure out how to be more “handy” before any of that happens.
Read More: Where is Marriage or Mortgage Filmed?
