Amanda Batula I put everything on my husband Kyle CookeFrom the beginning, she was part of Loverboy, her company, but after five years she realized that it was affecting her marriage.
“I took a small step back for the sake of our relationship,” Batula, 32, said exclusively Us weeklyreferring to her role as creative and branding director of Loverboy.
The summer house Star, who married Cooke, 42, in September 2021, began working part-time when she founded Loverboy in 2018. She later quit her job and worked full-time at the beverage company to make Cooke’s dream come true.
“I think we were at a point where if something happened to me I would be frustrated and he would take it very personally,” Batula explained. “Or he complained about something I approved and I made a decision that I took personally. So it wasn’t good for our relationship.”
Kyle Cooke and Amanda Batula.
Jordan Strauss/BravoBatula noted that she is “still very involved with Loverboy,” but no longer in the “day-to-day capacity” as she once was.
“I think we needed a little bit of this separation for now,” she said, adding that the decision was positive for the couple. “When we had our relationship problems and our work problems, it was a lot. So that seems to be working for us at the moment.”
During season 8 of summer house, which was filmed in the summer of 2023, cracks began to appear in the relationship between Batula and Cooke. A lot of her tension this season has to do with her work-life balance.
Kyle Cooke and Amanda Batula have weathered reality TV drama, cheating scandals, and wedding delays over the course of their relationship — and they’re still going strong. The Summer House stars’ romance has been going on since the first season of the Bravo series, which premiered in January 2017. Cooke, who met Batula in the summer of 2015, signed […]
“At first I was very hesitant to quit my job and work for Loverboy full time. But that’s exactly what Kyle wanted,” Batula said during a March episode of the Bravo series, telling the cameras, “Maybe we were wrong.”
Batula expressed her desire to part ways with the company during a preview of the rest of the season that took place earlier this week.
Amanda Batula and Kyle Cooke.
Chelsea Guglielmino/Bravo“I have been supporting you and your company for five years. It’s time for me to find something that gives me drive,” she told Cooke in the Thursday, April 11, clip while sitting on a boat. Cooke, the founder of Loverboy, replied: “[But] I need your help too.”
Batula told Us She initiated her step back.
“Honestly, I just did it after BravoCon [in November 2023]. I thought, ‘I need a break,'” she recalls. “And then [I] I just never fully immersed myself in work again. I’ve sort of had my meetings and done the tasks that I’m supposed to do, but when I slowly step back, he asks, ‘Are you not attending these meetings?’ I was like, ‘No’.”
The cast of Summer House has proven time and time again that the Hamptons doesn’t always make for successful relationships — and the season eight premiere was no different. When the new season began on Thursday, February 22, not every couple in the house got off to a good start. While Us Weekly confirmed […]
Batula explained that her decision was for two reasons: she wanted to start finding her own passion and she wanted to improve her relationship with Cooke.
“I don’t want us to get annoyed with each other about the job. You know what I mean?” she said Us. “I’m the type of person who works to live, not lives to work. So I would hate for this beautiful thing we are building to be the reason we may have broken up or fallen out.”
The reality TV bromance between Summer House’s Carl Radke and Kyle Cooke has been going strong since at least 2016 — but it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. Fans met the duo at the Summer House premiere in 2017 after filming the previous summer. As their friendship grew, Carl ended up working for Kyle at Loverboy […]
Ultimately, the limited role on Loverboy improved the couple’s dynamic. “[Now] We can focus on our relationship and then hopefully get back to a place where I’m more committed again,” Batula added.
Batula’s move within the company occurred around the same time as Cooke’s best friend Carl Radke rejoined the company in a limited capacity. Radke, 39, announced back in February 2023 that he was an investor in the brand but had stopped working for Cooke.
At BravoCon in November 2023, Cooke announced Loverboy’s new alcohol-free line and revealed that the sober Radke helped launch it.
summer house airs Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET on Bravo.
With reporting by Christina Garibaldi