It’s known that Wells Adams, 34, slid into Sarah Hyland’s DMs to spark their romance, but the Modern Family star has finally revealed the timeline of when they actually met face to face. It goes to show that there’s no right time to fall in love. “We met each other for the first time three days before my [kidney] transplant,” Sarah told Self in an interview published on Dec. 10. “He was texting me in the morning before I went into surgery, and we were FaceTiming the entire time I was in the hospital.” It was September 2017, and the 28-year-old actress was receiving her second kidney transplant — that time, from her younger brother Ian Hyland, 23, after her body eventually rejected the first kidney transplant from dad Edward Hyland.
“It was a really intimate start” to their relationship, which went public in October 2017, since they had to “go through those hurdles at the very, very, very beginning when you’re just even getting to know a person,” Sarah explained. And the sitcom star admitted that she fell in love with Wells, who competed on Season 12 of The Bachelorette, before they could even “really be intimate” — something she had previously “did not believe” was possible! And Wells was not only sticking by Sarah’s side via cell phone — he even showed up to her bedside, and saw her “hooked up to all sorts of wires.” As she now explained, “He’s seen me at my worst…I think that’s why I feel the most beautiful in his eyes, because he still finds me beautiful after seeing all that.”
But a surgery wasn’t the only event on Sarah’s schedule during the week of their first date, which happened at an Emmy Awards party! “September 16th I had an [Emmy Awards] party and my first date with [Wells]. The 17th was the Emmys. The 18th I had work on Modern Family at 6 A.M,” Sarah recalled to the heath publication. “And then I went to dialysis afterwards. And then I had to be at the hospital at 4 o’clock in the morning for my transplant the next day.”
To add to that whirlwind, Wells had just learned about Sarah’s health issues, which include kidney dysplasia, endometriosis and a then undetected hernia. Sarah, who’s had 16 surgeries in her lifetime, revealed that she started chatting with Wells a month before her second kidney transplant. However, she initially kept her health scares private, problems of which had even made her contemplate suicide. Sarah just didn’t predict their relationship evolving into anything serious!
As the ABC star has recalled in interviews before, she first tweeted at Wells when his tenure on The Bachelorette was done, and he took the bait — he sent her a direct message on Twitter. “Then I started to really, really like the dude,” she explained to Self. While watching him on the small screen, his “nerd-hot” aesthetic, “funny” personality and dimples first attracted her, she mused to the magazine.