A divorced couple who went viral for reconnecting and falling in love with each other again seven years later are officially re-married.
Cincinnati couple Julie Shore and Scott Gaede remarried in a small, intimate ceremony on 28 December with only their two daughters, Rachel, 24, and Caroline, 20, in attendance. Rachel - who had been documenting the wedding planning process on her TikTok account - later shared with her followers, “Everyone wept their eyeballs out.”
After the ceremony, she went on to post a TikTok from the ceremony, joking in the caption that the wedding was a “successful parent trap” referencing the 1998 film starring Lindsay Lohan, in which a pair of separated twin sisters plot to get their divorced parents to fall in love again. In the video’s overlaid text, the eldest daughter wrote: “WAR IS OVERRRRRR our parents are officially REmarried and we are no longer children of divorce.”
The video has garnered more than 500,000 likes on the platform, with many viewers finding the parents’ journey back to the altar heartwarming. One viewer wrote, “Thanks for taking the time to share this journey with us strangers.”
“Wait, so all that trauma was for nothing?!” one viewer joked, while another added: “This is my royal wedding.”
Both aged 54, the couple first tied the knot 27 years ago in 1997 but separated in 2014. When asked what led to the initial separation, Julie explained to Insider that there was no “landmark scandal,” while Scott described the events leading up to it as a “slow deterioration.” They reportedly lived together in the same house, with Scott in the guest room for many years post-separation, but they both eventually moved apart upon the finalisation of the divorce in 2018. At the time, their daughters called the divorce a relief.
“It was kind of amicable at first, but then got contentious,” Julie recalled of the divorce. She said tensions were at an all-time high, with them butting heads over property division. “We were not friends after that. And we both did see other people. We both had other relationships.”
But during the COVID-19 pandemic, the two began to find their way back to each other. They started to talk again and she began to coordinate quarantine-safe visits with Scott, who was living on his own at the time. Julie said, “Friendship is an overstatement, but we became friendly.”
It was only after Scott’s mother died in November 2020 that the pair “levelled up to a friendship.” Julie ended up driving to be there with him at the hospital and support him. Around six months later in May 2021, Scott’s father died eleven hours after his father’s business partner and best friend in what was a part of a “highly emotional” rollercoaster of a week. The two deaths came just days after their daughters graduated from high school and college respectively.
These intense events brought the pair closer together, and they began to officially date again after a five-day trip to the Pacific Northwest in which they hashed things out. By December, the whole family moved into a new house together.
When asked about her parents' reconciliation, Caroline told the outlet, “They were friends in a way that they never had been. We were doing things that we hadn’t done since I was probably 12 or 13, and it was more fun than it ever was.”
With things between them going swimmingly, Scott recalled feeling as though it was “obvious” that the two of them were going to remarry, while Julie said that she felt like she had her “hand just above the panic button,” unsure whether or not the rug would be pulled out from beneath her. Scott’s proposal timeline shifted when Julie’s 98-year-old mother had a health scare, leading Scott to plan a surprise proposal - with a little bit of help from his daughters - and ask Julie’s mother for permission, to which she reportedly replied, “It’s about time.”
During Christmas in 2022, Scott proposed to not just Julie, but the whole family, giving their daughters little engagement rings with diamonds from Julie’s original engagement ring. Since then, Rachel has not only shared her parents’ love story but also documented the “on the fly” 20-day planning process for their second trip down the aisle, updating her TikTok following along the way.
Rachel told the outlet that the ceremony ultimately took place in a beautiful window-filled hallway of a local theatre, and both parents wrote their vows. Julie reportedly wore a shorter wedding dress “reminiscent” of her first one, while the two daughters wore blue satin mini dresses. A cousin named Cameron - who served as the ring-bearer at their first wedding - officiated the wedding in a full circle moment.
