Brittany Cartwright says she and Brandon Hanson are still friends after ending their brief relationship, even as The Valley Season 3 brings the romance back into view. Cartwright said watching that chapter play out on television feels “strange” because it was, by her own account, only a short fling.
“I was just having fun at the time, and we’re still friends,” Cartwright said, adding that the relationship was easy to step away from because she had already learned a lot from past relationships. On May 1, she said on her podcast that she and Hanson were no longer together and that she had closed that chapter in her life.
That leave-behind has not stopped the Bravo-era reality of the story from following her into the new season. Cartwright introduced Hanson to her friends and viewers at the beginning of Season 3, and she has said fans will see more of their relationship as the season unfolds. She described the romance as a boyfriend situation that lasted a couple of months, then traced it back to someone she knew from Kentucky long before they reconnected.
The timing matters because Cartwright is also in the middle of a divorce from Jax Taylor, the father of her 5-year-old son, Cruz Cauchi, and she has been blunt about needing time to recover from that upheaval. On May 8, she said on her podcast that she was “single as a Pringle,” adding that she had “a lot of healing to do” and was still working on herself while raising Cruz. She also said, “I’m always going to keep working on myself. I deserve to be happy and get the butterflies.”
Cartwright has tried to draw a line between the two stories in her life: the short-lived relationship with Hanson and the longer, messier breakup that still shadows her. She said she learned “so much” from the Hanson relationship and that the split was straightforward to navigate because she knew it was not what she needed at the time. “The way I handled [the breakup] was great,” she said, describing the decision as one made in the middle of a period when she was “having a blast” and “dating and having fun.”
The contradiction is part of what makes the story linger on screen. Cartwright says she is not hiding the breakup or pretending it was more serious than it was, but The Valley is built to keep personal timelines in the open, and Season 3 is already turning a short fling into a plotline. Earlier this month, she said she and Hanson are still friends, underscoring that the relationship ended without a major break even if it did not last.
For Cartwright, the bigger story today is not Hanson. It is that she says she is still single, still healing and still focused on Cruz while the cameras keep rolling around the life she is trying to rebuild.
