Ethan Plath is still figuring out what went wrong in his marriage to Olivia Plath, but he thinks part of their friction was due to her own family issues.
“I’ve done a lot of thinking about what the true problem was with my family, me and Olivia,” Ethan, 26, revealed during the Tuesday, September 3, episode of Welcome to Plathville. “I mean, Olivia was just consumed with all these problems she saw with the way we were raised.”
Ethan claimed that Olivia’s opposition to her Christian fundamentalist upbringing negatively affected her relationship with Ethan’s family. (Olivia grew up in Virginia as one of 10 children and was told from a young age she was supposed to be subservient to a man.)
“I think what it comes down to is Olivia hated the way that she grew up with her family and the problems that her family had,” he alleged. “And at the end of the day, [she] was rewriting everything for herself and what she believed. And she had to reject everything else.”
Olivia, 26, and Ethan had been together for nearly a year before getting engaged in 2017. According to Olivia, that’s when she learned that Ethan’s mom, Kim Plath, wanted to have a say in their everyday life — which reminded her of the controlling environment her parents enforced as a child.
“When we were dating, I knew that I was being controlled in what we were allowed to do, what we’re allowed to say,” Olivia exclusively told Us Weekly in August 2021. “I remember the night that it clicked for me was the night we got engaged. We come in the door, [Kim] waited up for us and she, like, grabbed my hand and looked at the ring. And the first thing she said was, ‘Oh, I want to trade rings with you.’ And I was like, ‘OK, that’s really weird.’”
Olivia claimed that her former mother-in-law told her “what we were going to be doing” in regards to their wedding planning. “And that was the moment where I was like, ‘I don’t want to be controlled like this,’” she recalled. “I never got to tell my mom that I was engaged before [Kim] posted it online. That’s how my mom found out.”
Ethan and Olivia both grew up in fundamentalist households that promoted traditional gender roles and patriarchal hierarchies. They eventually tied the knot in October 2018, but Olivia continued to butt heads with Ethan’s family.
“It was just, like, a pattern that she tried to make a lot of decisions for me,” Olivia told Us in August 2021. “And I was fresh out of my parents’ house and figuring out who I was, and I didn’t want decisions made for me. The wedding was where a lot of that culminated, but it was just across the board. … That created a whole bunch of tension.”
Even after the couple moved away from Ethan’s hometown in Georgia to Minnesota, they couldn’t make it work. Olivia and Ethan split in October 2023 and finalized their divorce earlier this year.
Looking back, Ethan said that Olivia’s dynamic with his family was “very, very, very negative.” While he understands Olivia’s problems with her childhood, he noted on Tuesday’s episode that he had a different experience.
“I feel like my childhood was mostly good and I would totally move back to Cairo at some point,” he told the cameras.
Ethan later confessed that his choice to call out Olivia for not cooking for him on the show ahead of their split only heightened Olivia’s past problems with the constraints of their religious parents.
“I was not saying in any way that every woman in the world should be in the kitchen cooking three meals a day. That’s not at all what I meant,” he claimed, noting that during the early days of their marriage he felt “taken care” of when Olivia cooked for him.
Ethan alleged that Olivia “hadn’t cooked a meal in two years” when he told her during season 5 that her place was in the kitchen. “When she stopped, it just felt like she didn’t really care,” he continued. “My comment that I made was not about cooking three meals a day. I was not feeling loved, and I was very angry.”
Olivia, meanwhile, revealed in the episode that cooking for her husband wasn’t the only thing she was taught to do as a young woman.
“The other thing that I was told is, like, once you are married and you can have sex and not go to hell, your job is to make him happy. Your job is to please him. It’s about him,” she claimed in the episode, noting that Ethan was “told the same thing” in his house.
Olivia noted that “purity culture really f–ked me up,” adding that she no longer wants to follow the rules her parents laid out for her.
Welcome to Plathville airs on TLC Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET.
