Which Couples From USA Network’s Temptation Island Season 1 Are Still Together?
Temptation Island is the reality TV gift that keeps on giving since the latest reboot on Netflix was such a success. The show, which technically started back in 2002 on Fox, was rebooted first in 2019 on the USA Network and ran for five seasons before Netflix picked it up. Temptation Island was ahead of its time in terms of sultry island-goers and romantic experiments. We can’t help but wonder where the four couples on the first season of the USA Network version are now and whether any of them are still together.
The four couples on the USA Network’s first season were Javen Butler and his girlfriend, Shari Ligons, Karl Collins and his partner, Nicole Tutewohl, John Thurmond and his longtime love, Kady Krambeer, and Evan Smith and his love, Kaci Campbell. It’s never a great sign if your partner suggests going on Temptation Island to test your relationship before taking the next step, but these four couples were game for the sultry romantic experiment where couples are separated and surrounded by single tempters and temptresses whose sole job is to tempt them to cheat.
Javen & Shari
Don’t Appear To Be Together In 2025
Javen and Shari were the most promising of the four couples on this season. They were high school sweethearts from San Francisco who had been dating for eight years before joining Temptation Island. They had been living together for five years and were considering marriage, but Shari said she didn’t want to rush into marriage just because they’d been together for so long. She wanted to make sure Javen was ready since she’d caught him cheating in the past.
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Javen had a lot to prove, and he was one of the only men on the season who didn’t cheat on his girlfriend, Shari. The two got engaged on the season finale, which aired in March 2019. A year later, Showbiz CheatSheet reported that they’d broken up due to cheating rumors on Shari’s part. They must have patched things up because Javen tagged Shari in a “date night” post in March 2024.
More recently, however, they haven’t appeared on each other’s feeds in a long time. Both post actively, but neither has shared a couples photo of themselves (or them with other partners) in years. Javen doesn’t follow Shari on Instagram, and neither does Shari follow Javen. The couple had a joint YouTube page, Shari and Javen, at one point, but it’s been scrubbed of all videos.
Karl & Nicole
Not Together
Karl and Nicole went to Temptation Island because they had some trust issues stemming from the beginning of their relationship. When they first met at a gym, Nicole had a boyfriend and left him for Karl. The Chicago couple had been dating for two-and-a-half years when they made the trip to Temptation Island.
Turns out, they both felt connections with some of the singles on the cast, and while in the end, they didn’t choose to leave the island with a new partner, they also didn’t leave with each other. After the test of the show, they felt it was best to break up. They got back together following filming, but as of 2025, they are no longer together and do not follow each other on Instagram. Nicole shared a Tweet in 2022, proclaiming she was “single & ready to mingle,” so the pair broke up sometime between 2021 and 2022.
John & Kady
Not Together
John and Kady seemed ill-suited from the start. They’d met on Bumble and had been dating for three years before deciding to join Temptation Island. Kady seemed very displeased with the person John was and kept saying she wanted a “cowboy” man. I’m not even sure why these two were even together, to begin with. They lived together in Texas and began the season by saying that Kady questioned John’s “masculinity” often.
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Kady was instantly tempted by Johnny, who was more her speed in terms of “masculinity.” Upon seeing Kady was connecting with Johnny, John decided to pursue his connection with a single, Katheryn. At the end of the show, John and Kady choose to leave the island alone, without their new partners or each other. According to a story run by USA Network, they briefly tried to rekindle, but when Kady told John she was visiting Johnny in New York, they broke up for good.
Evan & Kaci
Not Together
By far, the most memorable couple from this season of Temptation Island was the doomed Evan and Kaci. They’d been dating for 10 years, exclusively for five, and lived together in Los Angeles. The two started out the show joking about how Evan would never cheat on Kaci because he had experienced infidelity in his own family as a child and would never repeat that mistake. Never say never because as soon as Evan met Morgan Lolar, all bets were off.
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Evan and Morgan, a temptress, had been drawn to each other instantly. Evan seemed almost infatuated with her. Kaci was forced to sit back and watch Evan fall in love with Morgan, leaving her heartbroken.
Their break-up scene is one of the most traumatic I’ve ever seen, with Kaci sobbing and pleading with Evan not to do this, and Evan telling her he’s leaving the island with Morgan.
The drama with these three didn’t stop when the cameras stopped filming. Evan and Morgan got engaged, then broke up when it was revealed Evan had cheated on Morgan, according to US Weekly. The one pair who got out of this mess intact, Kaci and Morgan, who reconnected after Evan cheated on Morgan and became friends, bonded over the chaos Evan put them through.
Today, Kaci is open about her experiences on Temptation Island but said she isn’t watching the Netflix version. Kaci shared a TikTok on March 31, jumping on the “horror movie” trend, where someone describes a traumatic moment. She wrote over a photo of herself sobbing on Temptation Island that her favorite horror movie was:
“That time I went on a reality show with my boyfriend & best friend of 10 years because he was unemployed & we desperately needed the money to pay bills & he swore no matter what happened we would break up off camera (I had dumped him a few months ago before the show & he begged for a last chance to prove himself) but then he cheated on you on national television for a girl he knew for 21 days.”
USA Network’s Temptation Island season 1 is available to stream on multiple platforms, including YouTube TV.
Sources: Showbiz CheatSheet, Javen Butler/Instagram, Shari and Javen/YouTube, Nicole Tutewohl/Twitter, USA Network, US Weekly, Kaci Campbell/TikTok
