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Ariana Madix didn’t give up on love following her ex-boyfriend Tom Sandoval’s infamous cheating scandal with their former co-star, Rachel “Raquel” Leviss. Shortly after she and Tom split in March 2023, Ariana began dating her current boyfriend, Daniel Wai, who will make minor appearances on Vanderpump Rules season 11. Keep reading to learn more about their romance!
When Did Ariana Madix and Daniel Wai Start Dating?
The couple were first spotted together in April 2023 at the Coachella Valley Music Festival. Ariana shared a few photos of the two of them together to social media, which sparked fans’ interest in her new beau since she had just split from Tom.
Ariana and Daniel first met at a mutual friend’s wedding before they were seen getting close at Coachella.
“I met him at a wedding about 10 days after all of this,” Ariana said on Today in May 2023. “And in no way shape or form did I go into that thinking anything, and I’ve just been taking things very, very slow and really enjoying myself.”
“It’s just really lovely to interact with someone who is so nice and kind and caring,” she added.
Is Daniel Wai on ‘Vanderpump Rules’?
The cast of VPR reunited over the summer of 2023 to film season 11, except for Rachel. Daniel will briefly appear on the new season, but he is not an official cast member.
Multiple outlets reported that Daniel was seen accompanying his girlfriend and the other cast members on a trip to San Francisco in September 2023 while cameras recorded the outing.
Ariana addressed how frequently her boyfriend will appear on the new season of the reality show in an interview with E! News. “Once or twice, but definitely not very much,” she said. “He’s not into the whole world of it all. It was very foreign to him, but I give him props for being a good sport on my behalf.”
What Is Daniel Wai’s Job?
Daniel works as a personal trainer and fitness coach, according to his business’s website. He lives in New York City and owns a business named DW Fitness on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
After graduating from college as a computer science and business, Daniel worked as a consultant to several Fortune 500 companies. However, he realized that consulting wasn’t his passion, and so he worked multiple jobs in New York while pursuing his dreams.
“For an entire year, I balanced both my consulting job and a part time job as a trainer, training clients in the morning, working 9 to 5 and then training clients at night,” Daniel wrote in his website’s bio. “Although I was proud of the work I was producing from my consulting job, it was neither fulfilling nor inspiring. However, the few hours daily I was spending with my clients that I was training changed my entire outlook on life.”
Since Daniel’s job keeps him in New York, he and Ariana have a long-distance relationship.
“Of course there are moments when I’m like, ‘Man, I wish he was over here,’ ” Ariana told Access Hollywood. But I think that long distance is something that’s been really good because it has allowed me to focus on me, and not be jumping into something after everything that I went through,” she added. “I have so much more time to be able to process and also really be able to get to know somebody purely on a mental and emotional level, as opposed to us being physically together all the time.”
What Happened Between Tom Sandoval and Ariana Madix?
Tom’s cheating scandal that is now known as “Scandoval” surfaced in March 2023 after Ariana discovered a screen recording of Raquel on Tom’s phone. The video confirmed that Raquel and Tom were having an affair, which was later revealed to have begun in August 2022. Ariana and Tom’s messy breakup unraveled during the season 10 finale, marking the end of their nine-year relationship.
