Dallas couples have made a flashy showing on Marrying Millions from the start. The first season, which aired in mid 2019, featured Dallas Design District developer Bill Hutchinson, now 62, and his now-22-year-old girlfriend Brianna Ramirez. It also put a spotlight on mom of four Katie Hamilton (and ex-wife of former Texas Rangers player Josh Hamilton) and her twentysomething beau Kolton Pierce, 14 years her junior.
Hamilton and Pierce will not return for Season Two of Marrying Millions, but Hutchinson and Ramirez will.
“Bri and I had a lot of fun filming Season One, and we were sad when the experience was over,” Hutchinson says. “Spending so much time with the director and the crew becomes a normal part of your life, and so when it is over, you feel a small void in your life and routine. It’s very interesting how that grows on you.”
Another North Texas duo, Daniela “Dani” Michelle Parra and Donovan Ruffin, of Frisco, will be among the seven couples on Season Two of Marrying Millions.
The show comes from the makers of 90 Day Fiancé. In each relationship, one person is wealthy and the other is not. Some are generations apart, like a 68-year-old Florida man who lives on a yacht with his 23-year-old girlfriend. Lifetime notes “the shock factor of their 45-year age gap” in a press release.
Marrying Millions premieres on Lifetime at 9 p.m. Aug. 5. Here’s more information about the two Dallas-area couples.
Meet Frisco couple Dani and Donovan
Donovan Ruffin, age 26, and Daniela “Dani” Michelle Parra, 25, met at Liberty High School in Frisco. They never dated then: “I was kind of a playboy in high school,” Ruffin says. And Parra was in a relationship at the time.
After she finished college at Arizona State University, she and Ruffin reconnected and started dating. Ruffin runs a company called Equity Cash Offer, and Parra eventually started working there after other jobs didn’t work out.
“We were traveling pretty much every weekend,” Parra says. “I ended up getting a couple of jobs but I would always have to quit because we would travel so much.” She liked working for Ruffin because it was a steady paycheck — “I wanted some of my own spending money,” she says — but she began to resent the fact that she made a significantly lower salary.
“As his business began to grow ... with the growth came more responsibilities, and with more responsibilities came more pressure,” Parra says. “It was not a good mix, to have that much pressure in a relationship.” She has since left the company and is focusing on interior design. The two have been together for three years.
Parra and Ruffin believe they’ve got a new story for Marrying Millions viewers: He’s an introvert, she’s an extrovert. Neither grew up with much money, they say.
“We’re two go-getters,” Parra says. “I thought it would be awesome to portray that. Just because you’re with someone with a lot of money doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a gold digger.”
Meet Dallas couple Bill and Bri
Bill Hutchinson met Brianna “Bri” Ramirez when she was a hostess at a Tex-Mex restaurant in Dallas. The two have been dating for three and a half years.
In interviews with The Dallas Morning News, Hutchinson says their 40-year age difference is a point of confusion for other people.
“People are intrigued by us because we aren’t normal,” he says. Hutchinson is a father of five, and Ramirez is younger than Hutchinson’s three oldest kids.
Hutchinson is the president of Dunhill Partners, the company that partnered with Richard Branson to build the Virgin Hotel in the Dallas Design District. The company manages several dozen shopping centers and operates more than 1 million square feet of showrooms, art galleries and restaurants.
Ramirez explained on Season One that she comes from a poor family who found Hutchinson’s luxurious lifestyle, with his sprawling Dallas estate and vacation homes, foreign. Hutchinson took Ramirez on her first plane ride: “It was neat for me to get to experience a first in another person’s life,” Hutchinson said in an interview in 2019. “I don’t remember mine; I’ve been flying all over the place my whole life.”
Marrying Millions will follow the two on vacations this season. It will also revisit their friends’ discomfort with their relationship.
“It becomes more obvious how Bri seeks her family’s approval, and I try to bring the two families together more,” Hutchinson says. “Friends are very important to both of us, but they are not always easy to mix, as we come from very different backgrounds.”
