Real-Life Love
Who Is Jen Hatmaker’s Boyfriend Tyler Merritt? All About the HGTV Star’s New Love
Though she’s since become known as a lifestyle influencer and author, Jen Hatmaker initially burst onto the scene as the host of My Big Family Renovation about a decade ago, alongside her now-ex husband, Brandon Hatmaker, and their five kids.
In her new memoir, Jen gets candid about the deterioration of her 26-year-long marriage for the first time. In 2020, the HGTV alum discovered that her husband was cheating on her.. Brandon has since married someone else — he says that his new wife wasn’t his affair partner — and Jen has moved on as well.
Jen has been in a relationship with her boyfriend, Tyler Merritt, for a few years now. Who is her new love, and what’s their relationship history? Read on for everything we know.
Who is Tyler Merritt?
A 49-year-old Nashville native, Merritt is an actor, comedian, vocalist, and creator of the multimedia platform The Tyler Merritt Project. He’s appeared in Netflix’s Messiah, Outer Banks, Marvel’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and more.
Like his girlfriend, Merritt has penned a number of books. His memoir, I Take My Coffee Black, came out in 2021. More recently, the multi-hyphenate artist recounted his cancer diagnosis, treatment, and recovery in This Changes Everything. Merritt has liposarcoma, a type of soft tissue cancer, and had a 28-pound tumor removed in 2020.
In April 2025, he shared a health update on Instagram. “The smile in this picture is finding out that the Cancer left in my body hasn’t grown,” he wrote. “That’s good news. In fact, it’s the best possible news.”
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How long have Jen Hatmaker and Tyler Merritt been together?
They met in November 2021, but Jen didn’t tell the public about their relationship until February 2022.
In her Instagram hard launch, Jen introduced Merritt to her followers. “Community, you have gone with me through the suffering… So of course you get to know about the surprising return of love,” she wrote. “I didn’t need Tyler to heal my broken heart. Me and Jesus did that on our own. He isn’t a missing piece. I am whole. So is he. I am learning what it looks like when two whole, healthy people fall for each other without the pressure of fixing or ‘completing’ the other.”
After their first meeting, they fell for each other over the course of two months, though they were separated by distance at the time. “Oh you guys. The FaceTimes that lasted until 2:00am, the endless texts all day every day, the absolute shock of falling in love again,” Jen wrote earlier this year on Instagram. “We went completely bonkers for each other.”
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How did Jen Hatmaker and Tyler Merritt meet?
In that same introductory post, Jen explained how she crossed paths with her boyfriend. “We met randomly in New York at the beginning of November,” she remembered. “He was there to lay claim to life. I was there unknowingly stepping into the story. He is now so impossibly important to me, so miraculous, I could just throw my head back and laugh every time I think of him.”
She continued, “We spent this weekend in New York, where it all started over French fries, honey mustard, and Waitress.”
Jen provided more details a little over a year later, just ahead of the second anniversary of their first meeting. It was unplanned, she said, so it appears they had a Broadway meet-cute.
“I remember so much about that night, small details,” she recalled in a Facebook post. “Not the least of which was walking toward him at the Renaissance before our show, shocked at how he sort of took up the whole room. I didn’t know. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t yet realize he was that guy from the video I’d seen a couple of years earlier, the one we’d all seen.” (In 2020, Merritt’s “Before You Call the Cops” video took off on social media.)
Do Jen Hatmaker and Tyler Merritt have kids?
While Jen shares five kids with her ex, Merritt doesn’t have any of his own. He’s also never married before. However, it seems that he’s involved in her kids’ lives. “Let’s horrify our kids for the next 40 years,” she wrote in 2023. “May our grandchildren tell us to get a room.”
