Monique Samuels is ready to keep it real.
Though she’s already a familiar face to reality fans from her tenure on The Real Housewives of Potomac, the reality star is having a fresh experience and sharing a new side of herself with fans on OWN’s new spinoff series.
Love & Marriage DC follows Monique Samuels and her husband Chris Samuels, as they navigate the triumphs and difficulties of married life among two other couples, including DJ Quicksilva and his wife Ashley Silva and James and Erana Tyler, while also navigating the upscale lifestyle and social scene of the Chocolate City.
With a fresh start on this new platform, Samuels feels that she’s finally able to give her fans “the full Monique experience,” even while co-starring with her husband of ten years.
“Even on the other show, I wasn’t focused on as an individual. It was like 20% of who I was. You’re going to be able to see me as a wife, a mother, an entrepreneur, a person who is always on the grind, trying to look out for other people, putting myself in the back burner, just so that I can make sure
everybody else is good, because that truly is who I am,” Samuels said.
Samuels says she’s just as dedicated to this platform as she was to her previous one, but now, the full truth has more of an opportunity to shine.
“When I was on the previous reality TV series, it was almost like I was put into a box,” she continued. “I gave it 100% the same way I did with filming this new show, Love & Marriage: DC, but the only difference was they only pulled out of that box what benefited what their end goal was.”
“One thing I love about [show creator] Carlos King is that he’s like, ‘I just want to be a fly on the wall.’ So everything that we do is what we usually would do. There’s nothing that is contrived. There’s nothing that is like thrown our way. There’s no jab coming from the right or the left.”
Samuels says she has never been shy about baring all her truth on a reality TV platform, but her prior experiences as a Real Housewife gave her pause, based on the manner in which she felt reality was manipulated to serve a crafted storyline.
“I’ve never been nervous about putting my whole life on display. I just don’t want people to just create stuff. We have enough issues, we don’t need y’all adding to it.”
With a frank openness that’s not manipulated, Samuels says she’s able to watch her situation play out objectively, evaluate it, and perhaps make changes from there.
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“How many times do we have the advantage to watch ourselves back? We rarely get that, unless somebody’s recording us without knowing. So it allows you to see yourself in a different lens than you normally see yourself every day. And hopefully, that provokes you to change and it provokes you to grow. And for my husband and I, even though we went through and still going through a lot within our marriage, I hope that as we watch this season, it will allow us to use it as a sort of form of therapy as well.”
“We were able to be 100% open and vulnerable with the hopes that people will be able to look at our marriage and say, ‘Wow, it’s not picture-perfect, but now I see what happens. I see what they go through.’ And you see
the resolution, hopefully in the end.”