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Olivia Flowers has shed light on why she and Alex Williams decided to cancel their wedding mere weeks before it was scheduled.
Credit: Instagram
Several months after announcing the cancellation, the 33-year-old former Southern Charm star, who became engaged to Alex in October 2024, opened up about the pressures they faced. She talked about the challenges of organizing their wedding, what they did on the day they were meant to marry, and the current status of their relationship.
“We’re still together, and the decision was mutual,” Olivia explained in a February 13 interview with Page Six’s Virtual Reali-Tea. “We made the choice out of love, deciding to pause and give ourselves more time.”
Olivia revealed that the couple was driven to cancel the ceremony due to overwhelming anxiety about life after marriage. Initially, they blamed the wedding planning process for their stress. However, even as the event approached with all arrangements completed, they realized the tension persisted, prompting their decision to call off the wedding three weeks before the date.
According to Olivia, she and Alex were prompted to call off their big day after experiencing “so much stress about” what would happen “post-wedding.” And, while they initially scapegoated the wedding planning as the reason behind the tension, they realized three weeks out, and after everything was in place, that the stress wasn’t going away.
“So we had a lot of difficult conversations, but they were essential, and we realized we were both feeling stressed and nervous about things post-wedding, and we talked to our families,” she revealed. “We are incredibly close with them. We have the best friends and family and support system and it was just like, we can take a beat for ourselves. We can hit pause and get back in alignment with each other and what we want to do.”
Although Olivia, who began dating Alex in late 2023, had fun planning her wedding, she acknowledged that it kind of “[got] away from [her].”
“The wedding, it got very big,” she admitted. “It’s a party to everyone with all our people, and we love that, but to us, it’s a step into forever, and we take it very seriously.”
As she looked ahead to her future, Olivia said that both she and Alex want to focus on their careers, even though that means they’ll likely be spending more time apart.
“His career [needs] him in another city. [And] I want to be spending time more in New York,” she shared.
While Olivia said it felt “good” to call off the wedding with Alex, it was “really hard” on the day of.
“I went to Greenville, South Carolina, which is like one of my hometowns, and he went to Dallas and spent it with his family,” she revealed. “If I can say one thing, my bridesmaids know how to pivot a party. All my best friends, we just had a movie night. We had food, and we just kind of took our mind off things, but it definitely, it was tricky. We weathered the storm, but we could not have done it without the friends.”
After then noting that the budget “got hurt a little bit,” Olivia said she and Alex are now facing way less pressure.
“We stayed so united during this, and it did make us stronger, and once we kind of weathered the storm and the logistics of making that decision, we just fell into our support group, and we fell into each other,” she explained. “I just wanted to be good with him. I wanted our families to be good.”
“It’s definitely like a level up in the relationship. There’s like a whole new space of authenticity and just talking to each other. [And] that is how we reached the decision … acknowledging the disconnect that we were having, and it was because we were both feeling the stress and pressure of what’s to come next so taking the time, we really prioritized communicating,” she concluded.
Olivia Flowers was featured in a full-time role on Southern Charm‘s eighth and ninth seasons.