Who Is Ethan Plath From Welcome To Plathville?
Reality TV juggernaut TLC continues to explode its programming with more stories about controversially religious familial relationships as "Welcome to Plathville" kicks off its third season. The series follows another big, conservative cis-white family as the adult children rebel against their ultra-conservative parents and their overly strict rules and sheltered lives. The perfect recipe for conflict.
According to the TLC website description, the Plath children have "never had a soda, don't know who Spider-Man or Tom Brady is, and have never watched TV." Parents Kim and Barry Plath live in rural Georgia with their nine children: Ethan, Hosanna (who is not on the show), Moriah, Micah, Lydia, Isaac, Amber, Cassia, and Mercy, who range in age from 21 to 6 years old (at least, in Season 1). The "follow their own rules" parents proudly claim in the show's trailer to have raised their kids on a remote 55-acre farm in the southern part of the state, without television, internet, phones, or other comforts of modern life. (A bit ironic that they would make that claim and then put them on a reality television show.)
The series premiered in November 2019, as the older kids began exploring more of the outside world, starting to escape from their parents' strict rules. Their main entryway into the new world? Oldest son Ethan and his new wife, Olivia. Let's learn a little more about Ethan.
Ethan Plath met his wife Olivia at a Christian family event — but she's introduced him to many new things
Ethan Plath is the oldest of the Plath clan, born in May 1998, per Us Weekly — arriving only 10 months after Kim and Barry Plath's July 1997 wedding. He works as a mechanic and is a "lover of classic cars," according to his Instagram.
Ethan and Olivia, who has nine siblings of her own and grew up on a Virginia farm, met at a 2014 Christian event that fans of the Duggars may be familiar with: the Smokey Mountain No Greater Joy Shindig, according to Your Tango. Olivia's family, like the Plaths, are also Fundamentalist Christians, though not as strict — as evidenced by her profession as a blogger and wedding photographer. Per the outlet, Olivia and Ethan started a long-distance relationship in 2016, writing letters, probably because of Ethan's extremely limited access to technology. Once they found time away from their busy careers to meet in person, the courtship progressed quickly: Ethan proposed in 2017, and the two were married in 2018.
Ethan was only 21 years old as "Welcome to Plathville" premiered in 2019. He says in the trailer that living with Olivia has been "the best six months of my life." Perhaps because Olivia introduced him to many of the everyday pleasures he missed out on, like soda, alcohol, desserts, secular music, and cell phones. And then, Olivia started showing this new world to Ethan's younger siblings, too...
Ethan and Olivia Plath's rift with his parents may have started at their wedding
As Season 2 began, Ethan and Olivia Plath cut off all ties with Ethan's parents, Kim and Barry, who disapproved of Olivia, per Us Weekly. (We can see why, if Olivia was encouraging the family to broaden their horizons by breaking the parents' strict rules.) More than that, second oldest son Micah explained to the outlet that the rift really started at Ethan and Olivia's 2018 wedding, which took place at Kim's house. "I think a lot of it was my mom trying to make it her wedding almost," Micah said. "She had what she wanted to do. She's just ... really excited ... but she probably went a little overboard and Olivia definitely felt that way."
After their nuptials, the pair moved out of the farm and into their own house in Georgia. But that wasn't enough to separate them from Ethan's parents, who also moved into a new house themselves — less than a mile away from their offspring. "I was just like, really?" Ethan says in the Season 2 trailer. "The more we're trying to make space, the closer they're trying to come."
Ethan cut contact with his parents, and in response, Kim has forbidden the couple to see his siblings without her supervision. But based on the couple's endearing YouTube channel, it looks like the two are happier than ever (at least with each other).