This post contains spoilers for Selling Sunset season five.

Selling Sunset did not get the exclusive listing when it came to a burgeoning romance between two of its stars. In a world of DeuxMoi blind items and Instagram soft launches, it would’ve been nearly impossible to hide that real estate agent Chrishell Stause and her boss, broker Jason Oppenheim, were dating. 

As such, the fifth season of Selling Sunset—all 10 episodes of which debuted April 22—had a lot to prove. How does Netflix make a relationship that was announced back in July 2021 (before season 4 had even premiered) and over by the end of the year feel like must-see reality TV? The answer: by simply allowing Chrishell and Jason’s real life to happen.

The show’s fifth season leans hard into their interoffice romance, kicking things off with the European getaway on which Chrishell and Jason went public. During a trip with fellow agent (and Jason’s ex!) Mary Fitzgerald,  her husband, Romain Bonnet, Jason’s brother, Brett, and his girlfriend, Tina Louise, it becomes clear that our lovebirds have been dating on the down low for a while. Jason declares that he’s “in love” in episode one, and Chrishell says, “I feel like it’s the first time I’ve really been my full self and I don’t have to change anything.”

Last November, Stause told Vanity Fair that Oppenheim was her “best friend” even long before anything turned romantic. “When he kissed me, truly, even in the moment I thought like, Oh, my God. I thought it’d be something we’d laugh about the next day and not ever talk about again,” she said. “And, obviously, that did not happen.” Still, the pair kept their relationship hidden from production for months of filming season 4 before coming clean. “We kind of felt the walls closing in and knew that there was only a certain amount of time that we could keep the secret,” Stause admitted. 

In season five, the Oppenheim Group’s other agents are abuzz with news of their romance. Most are immediately supportive, jumping to questions about marriage and babies. Says Heather Rae El Moussa, whose wedding to HGTV star Tarek begins the season five finale, “Some women are just placeholders, and some are the game changers. [Chrishell] is [Jason’s]  gamechanger.” 

Of course, the merriment halts with one agent: the show’s resident villain, Christine Quinn. “Thank God we don’t have HR, could you imagine?” she quips upon hearing about the couple. “I was wondering why I wasn’t getting listings for a while and then I was like, ‘Oh yeah, because I’m not fucking my boss.’”

Naturally, Chrishell doesn’t take kindly to Christine’s comments, which include insinuations that Chrishell dated Jason while still married to This Is Us star Justin Hartley—whom she split from in the thick of Selling Sunset season 3. “You know what? I am fucking the boss, first of all—happily fucking the boss,” Chrishell declares. “And you know what, bitch? You could’ve been doing a threesome with Keller Williams and fucking Douglas Elliman himself and not bagged a listing.”

Ahead of the season, I was similarly skeptical about this relationship and its potential to be all too conveniently packaged for TV. But Chrishell and Jason wind up being weirdly compelling because they don’t follow the reality show rulebook. Viewers are not privy to most of their relationship’s major moments, including their decision to explore fertility treatments. Whether they’ll have kids becomes the couple’s prevailing storyline. Chrishell makes it clear that children are non-negotiable: “If you decide that you don’t want to be a father, I don’t think I could go forward with you.” And for much of the season, perennial bachelor Jason appears open to the idea. She dreams of giving a baby the childhood she didn’t have; he envisions passing down the brokerage,  Succession-style. They even visit a fertility doctor (off-camera) to begin the embryo fertilization process.