Loni Love spent six years telling anyone who would listen—on daytime television, in interviews, in her own words—that she’d finally found the one. His name was James Welsh. He was a painter from LA who didn’t know who she was when they met, and that, she said, was the whole point. By early 2025, the relationship was apparently over. Here’s the full story.
QUICK FACTS
- Boyfriend: James Welsh (actor, small business owner)
- Met: August 2018 on Christian Mingle
- First date: The Peppermint film premiere
- Relationship length: Approximately six years
- Current status: Reportedly split; James Welsh stated on Instagram in fall 2025 that he left the relationship in February 2025
- Marriage: Loni has stated she does not plan to marry again
Who Is Loni Love’s Boyfriend?
For about six years, Loni Love’s boyfriend was James Welsh, an actor and small business owner based in Los Angeles. Welsh appeared in Dirty John and had minor film roles, but he’s not a household name, and that was actually part of what drew Loni to him.
He runs Quality Painting Plus, a painting company he founded in Los Angeles. He’s been previously married and has two adult sons. He’s White, which made the relationship notable to many people who follow Loni, she’s been open about the fact that he was the first white man she ever dated.
Welsh is also considerably more private than Loni. She spent years hosting The Real on daytime television, talking about her relationship on air, crying on camera about how much his support meant to her. He mostly let her do the talking. That dynamic, the open one and the quiet one, ran through their entire relationship.
As of 2025, the two appear to be no longer together.
How Did Loni Love Meet James Welsh?
The story of how they met has become one of the more charming celebrity dating-app stories out there. According to Essence, Loni created an account on Christian Mingle in 2018, even though neither she nor James is Christian. Her reasoning was simple: she wanted to meet a nice man.
“I wanted to meet a nice man. And so I figured, well, let me go on ChristianMingle.com,” she told Ellen DeGeneres. “He was there too, and when he said he wasn’t really Christian but he’s religious, I was like, maybe this is God’s way of putting us together.”
Before their first date, she did her due diligence. They talked online for over a month. Then texted. Then she listened to his voice on a call. Her instructions for women navigating online dating, vet thoroughly, move slowly, meet somewhere public, weren’t just advice she dispensed on The Real. That’s exactly how she handled it herself.
Their first date was the Peppermint film premiere in 2018. She picked it strategically: a public setting where she could leave easily if things weren’t working. They didn’t need an exit. The night went well enough that she made the first move on the kiss, and James, by his own description, was very happy about it.
The Moment He Realized She Was Famous
One of the most-repeated stories from their early relationship is the moment James figured out who Loni Love actually was. When they first met, he genuinely didn’t know.
She recalls him asking at the film premiere: “Why are you walking the carpet? Oh, you have a line in the movie?” She told him no, she just got to walk it.
Later that night at the after-party, per ABC Radio reporting, people kept approaching her: “Loni! I love you on The Real…” She watched his face change with each interaction. And then it clicked for him.
“I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize you were Loni Love from…” he told her. She thought it was sweet, not embarrassing. His not knowing her as a celebrity meant that whatever interest he had in her was just in her.
That became a cornerstone of how she described the relationship. He came in without expectations shaped by her public persona.
What Loni Love Has Said About the Relationship
Loni talked about James Welsh on television more than she talked about almost anything else in her personal life during the later years of The Real. The through-line in all of it was compatibility; she kept coming back to that word.
“He’s different, his culture’s different from mine, but when we come together we know about compatibility,” she told The Real audience. “That’s never changing.”
She teared up on air more than once, talking about what his support meant. When the pandemic hit, and they spent extended time together for the first time, in quarantine, locked in the same house, she told Tamron Hall it confirmed everything. “If me and James can be together and he doesn’t die from my cooking, then we’re meant to be together.”
The interracial element of the relationship was something she addressed directly and repeatedly, because people kept bringing it up. She hadn’t set out to date a white man. She’d dated Black and Hispanic men her whole life. She told People magazine in 2019 that she’d simply left the door open: “The mindset that I had was let me find out who the person is before I go judging and saying, ‘Oh, I can’t date you because of this or that.’”
She also described James as an ally in the fullest sense. He engaged with what was happening politically and socially. He had empathy for what she went through as a Black woman in America. He had struggled financially coming up, not the image of white privilege people might project onto a white man in LA. She said that commonality mattered.
“I’m telling sisters, you don’t have to struggle if it’s hard,” she said. “Sometimes you just need to get out of it.”
Did Loni Love and James Welsh Get Married?
No. Loni Love and James Welsh were never married. And Loni made no secret of the fact that she didn’t intend to get married again.
She was briefly married in her 20s, she’s mentioned it on The Real and in interviews, though she’s never disclosed her ex-husband’s name. The marriage ended because he would have had to move to another state, which would have ended her entertainment career before it really began. She chose her career. The marriage ended.
After that, her views on marriage settled into something deliberate. She’s not against it, she said so clearly, multiple times, but she doesn’t see it as necessary for herself. She told Yahoo Life: “We live in more modern times now, where women can be a lot more independent, and they can still have the love they want.”
She invoked Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell more than once as her reference point, decades together, no marriage certificate, no less committed for the absence of it.
Welsh’s children, with whom Loni had not yet spent much time, even years into the relationship, also factored in. She was clear that she didn’t want children of her own, and she appreciated that he already had grown kids and wasn’t looking for a co-parent.
Are Loni Love and James Welsh Still Together?
Based on available reporting, no, they appear to have split in early 2025.
Per an X post reporting on a statement James Welsh made on his Instagram, he said he left the relationship in February 2025. He also reportedly suggested that viral videos circulating about them were embarrassing and implied Loni had something to do with them remaining online.
Loni has not made a public statement confirming the split. Given how openly she discussed the relationship over the years, the silence is notable.
This isn’t the first time breakup rumors circulated, there was a brief wave of them in late 2019 after a cryptic tweet Loni posted, and the two quickly shut it down with a joint Instagram video. James looked into the camera and said they had not broken up. This time, the statement appears to be coming from the opposite direction.
The relationship lasted roughly six years, from August 2018 through early 2025.
What Made the Relationship Work, and What That Means Now
Loni Love talked about James Welsh like she’d finally figured something out. After years of conforming to what the men she dated wanted, she found someone where that wasn’t the dynamic.
The compatibility angle she kept returning to wasn’t just talking-point language. For a woman who built her comedy on being honest about relationships, love, and her own missteps, who literally wrote a book called Love Him or Leave Him, But Don’t Get Stuck with the Tab, finding a relationship she didn’t feel the need to perform or bend herself to fit was the thing.
She was 47 when they met. He was well into his 50s. Neither of them was in a hurry for things to look a particular way. They didn’t rush the meeting-the-kids step. They didn’t push toward marriage. They built something on the terms they both actually wanted.
For six years, by all public accounts, it worked.
Whatever happened between February 2025 and James’s Instagram statement that fall is between them. Loni hasn’t offered an explanation, and she doesn’t owe one. What she said about finding love in her late 40s, that it’s possible, that compatibility is the thing to look for, that you don’t have to shrink yourself to have it, none of that changes based on how the relationship ended.
She’s still out here. Still touring. Still the girl from Detroit’s Brewster-Douglass projects who turned an electrical engineering degree into an Emmy.
That was never about James Welsh.
