Matthew Lawrence could not help but gush over his new girlfriend Chilli! The Boy Meets World star, 42, sounded head over heels in love when he opened up about his romance with the TLC icon, 51, calling her “really special.” “My life is in complete bloom right now,” he told ET on Friday, March 3. “I get to spend time with an amazing woman like Chilli. I’ve never gotten to be able to experience that kind of relationship before. She’s really, really special.”
The star went on to say he is in awe of Chilli’s “morals and values” and that they are more alike than they first realized. “It’s weird, you know, we have similar upbringings. We have similar families. There are similarities that you wouldn’t necessarily think between us and it really works,” Matthew explained.
He also dished on meeting Chilli’s family and the singer meeting his own, saying everything went swimmingly. As for starting a family of their own, Matthew spilled the tea to ET, admitting, “That’s the plan, that’s what were trying to do.” Chilli is already mother to a 25-year-old son named Tron from her previous relationship with Dallas Austin.
The actor also revealed how the pair first met, revealing they ended up chatting when a snowstorm put them on the same plane. “Really it was the flight talking and then afterwards saying, ‘hey, you know what? Let’s keep in contact,’ and it almost did not happen,” Matthew detailed. “Literally an hour before the flight took off, [the airline] said, ‘Okay, we got you on this flight. You gotta go.”
Matthew and Chilli took their romance public in January after they were linked together in August 2022 when they were spotted hanging out on a beach together in Hawaii. At the time, TMZ reported that the seaside jaunt was only platonic, and nothing was brewing at the moment. A source told the outlet that Chilli was on the tropical island to perform a show and “Matthew and some pals came to watch.” According to the insider, the pair were merely “friends” and decided to hang out after she finished the concert.
The beach hang came six months after news broke that Matthew had split with his wife of three years, Dancing with the Stars pro Cheryl Burke. Cheryl appeared to throw shade at her ex-husband and Chilli just hours after they confirmed they were “exclusively” dating. “That was fast,” she wrote on her Instagram Story.
She and Matthew tied the knot in May 2019 after being engaged for a year. According to the divorce docs obtained by HollywoodLife, Cheryl listed their date of separation as Jan. 7, 2022 with “irreconcilable differences” as the reason.