Things You Didn’t Know About Maci Bookout And Ryan Edwards Relationship

Long time fans of Teen Mom OG can easily remember a time when Maci Bookout and Ryan Edwards were not only in a relationship, but engaged! They first appeared together on MTV’s 16 and Pregnant as they prepared for the arrival of their son and then were seen planning their wedding in season 1 of Teen Mom. Unfortunately these two couldn’t make it work, but they must continue to have a relationship in order to co-parent Bentley. In her Bulletproof memoir, Maci revealed a lot about her relationship with Ryan both before and after the arrival of their son. Even though Maci is happily married and Ryan is newly engaged, we’re going to take a stroll down memory lane with these 15 things you probably didn’t know about Maci Bookout and Ryan Edwards’ relationship!

15. How They Met

Maci met Ryan through motorcross. He was apart of the same social group of people gathering at the local tracks and traveling to state events, so a familiarity developed between the two. One day Maci’s friend Abby told her there was a guy, named Ryan who had noticed her at the tracks and wanted to get to know her. He was best friends with Abby’s boyfriend. She suggested they all hang out and Maci agreed. In her Bulletproof memoir, Maci said she looked him up on MySpace and was immediately impressed as he was an older guy, who she described as “seriously good looking.”

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14. Maci Didn’t Want to Date at First

In high school Maci was not interested in relationships, so when Ryan came along, she made him work for it! “From the first moment we properly met in June, he gave me all of his attention. And I was careful not to lead him on. I made it clear that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to get involved with anyone…Even though I wasn’t giving him the kind of relationship he wanted, his focus never wavered…Little by little, my reservations about high school romance started to thaw. A few months in, I realized it was time to admit that I had feelings for him, too. By the time October rolled around, we were officially a couple,” she said.

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13. Wanted to Wait to Have Sex

In her book Bulletproof, Maci talked about how she and Ryan took their relationship to the next level which ultimately led to getting pregnant at the age of 16. Although she didn’t describe herself as a promiscuous teenager, she also wasn’t a prude. She simply wanted to wait for the right person. Even though Ryan was older than Maci, she said she never felt pressured into having sex — in fact she was the one who pressured him! They started having sex about three or four months into the relationship and ended up getting pregnant after about eight weeks. When she went to the doctor he told her she was eight weeks along which meant they’d most likely gotten pregnant on the first try.

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12. Telling Ryan She Was Pregnant

Maci found out she was pregnant on a Saturday after she started noticing some undeniable symptoms. She took a pregnancy test and confirmed her fears. The first person she told was of course Ryan. She called him while he was at work and told him she’d taken a test and it came out positive and then went to visit him in person. “The look on his face was the definition of confusion. He just stared at me with big round eyes and tried to process what I was saying. It seemed hard for him to understand that something so big could happen without any kind of warning. After all, we’d only been together for about six months…We were both reeling in disbelief, so it was quite an awkward conversation. And to top it off, he was still at work and could only stay outside for five or ten minutes before he had to get back on the job,” she wrote.

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11. Engagement

In her Bulletproof memoir, Maci reflected back on the time when she was briefly engaged to Ryan. She confirmed that the two only took that step because they felt pressured to. She said: “Back when Ryan and I found out we were pregnant, we’d both felt a lot of pressure to get married. He proposed to me on my seventeenth birthday, just before Bentley was born, and my mom and I did make a few moves toward planning a wedding. But it never felt like a natural thing to do. I loved Ryan at the time and wanted us to be a family, but the engagement always felt vaguely forced. It seemed like the right step to take, until it very obviously wasn’t.”

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10. Choosing the Name Bentley

Maci and Ryan chose Bentley’s name while sitting in the parking lot of a fast food joint! “We met at Sonic whenever we had a chance before his shift started, and that was where we chose the baby’s name. We were sitting in the parking lot with a baby name book, and at the time we didn’t even know if we were having a boy or girl. But when we saw the name Bentley, we immediately knew that was what we wanted,” she said.

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9. First Sign

Reflecting back on her relationship, one of the first signs of trouble (although she agrees there were many while she was pregnant) came during that first night in the hospital. Maci had been in labor for 37 hours and was exhausted when Bentley started crying in the middle of the night. Of course, she immediately woke up, but Ryan didn’t even flinch. “And as I lay there kind of freaking out, I expected, or hoped, he’d get up to do something to help. But he was just sleeping through it and not at all worried about anything but continuing to sleep. And there was a moment when I thought,’What in the world? I need you to get up and help me, what are you doing?'” she wrote.

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8. Trouble in Paradise

When they returned home to their apartment with Bentley, Ryan’s disengagement was immediate. She said he was almost never home. He worked all day and when his shift was over he was either at the gym, out with friends or when he finally got home, he’d go straight to bed. The two of them began arguing a lot and Ryan drifted further and further away. “To my complete shock and confusion, I just couldn’t figure out how to share that joy and excitement with him. Bentley was like this amazing, special energy in the house that was so easy to tap into. But I just couldn’t seem to get his father to see the appeal. And each day he found a reason he couldn’t spend time at home, I started grappling with the ugly possibility that he just didn’t want to be there,” she wrote.

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7. The End of Their Relationship

Maci and Ryan decided to call it quits for good in December, just a few months after Bentley’s first birthday. What people might not know is that they realized the relationship wasn’t going to work pretty early on, but decided to give it their best shot for Bentley. “There were a few months after Bentley was born and things had gone south where we had both acknowledged we weren’t in a good relationship, but we agreed we were going to work it out for Bentley. Unfortunately, things never got better. Eventually there wasn’t even enough of a connection for us to rescue. If we had still felt a bond and were still in love, I could have fixed things he didn’t like and he could have fixed things I didn’t like. But there was no mutual desire to build on,” she said.

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6. What Went Wrong

It’s pretty obvious why the relationship fell apart, especially when taking into consideration Ryan’s lack of interest in his new family, but Maci has also admitted her part in the demise of their relationship. She was unable to open up to Ryan about how she was feeling when he wasn’t around. “Even though I needed him, I didn’t know how to let him know…I could have said that outright. But I didn’t. And maybe that was why he seemed to think it didn’t matter if he was around or not. Maybe he just didn’t know what to do…Maybe that was what fuelled the distance between him and me and Bentley…Unfortunately, we were both people who didn’t express our emotions freely. We didn’t communicate as well as she should have,” she wrote.

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5. Cheating Allegations

To Maci’s surprise, Ryan moved on pretty quickly. “I started to hear things. About the girls he had been talking to, and the places he’d been. I didn’t seek the information out, but I didn’t have to. Sometimes when you break up with someone, that stuff starts to trickle into your hearing range whether you want it to or not. There were many things I heard that I didn’t care to hear. I wasn’t shocked, but it wasn’t fun,” she wrote.

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4. Problems Co-Parenting

Since Maci and Ryan have a child together, there was no way they were going to have a normal break up. They had to stay in communication for their son which wasn’t easy because they weren’t getting along. To make matters worse, Ryan still wasn’t participating in Bentley’s life, so instead of co-parenting with him, Maci found herself co-parenting with Ryan’s parents which made her even more mad. “Even after breaking up, that was one huge argument that refused to die. When I thought Bentley was going to visit his father for the weekend, I would sometimes make my own plans to visit friends or have a night or two to myself. But when I’d take Bentley to his grandparents’ house, his father was never there,” he said.

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3. Lack of Communication

Communication was definitely a big problem in their relationship and it only got worse when Ryan started dating other people. “He [began] dating a girl who was not at all comfortable with my existence. Ryan and I communicated at an absolute bare minimum, and only ever about Bentley. But she wasn’t about that at all. If I could manage to get him to pick up the phone when I called about something, she’d wind up mad at him and then he would act like it was my fault,” she said. Maci admitted that if it weren’t for the show, she probably wouldn’t have seen or spoken to Ryan at all. “It didn’t matter that the only time I ever reached out to him was [about Bentley]…I could never count on him to answer the phone or return a text, much less show up…The only communication Ryan and I had was on camera. There were long periods of time when if we hadn’t been filming a show together, he would never have spoken to me at all.”

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2. Friction Between Jen, Larry and Maci Over Ryan

It’s no secret that Ryan’s parents, Jen and Larry, have been the ones to step in and take care of Bentley when he’s supposed to be spending time with his father, Ryan. While Maci has expressed gratitude for their help, she also believes the more Jen and Larry step in, the more likely Ryan is to abandon his responsibilities. In her book Bulletproof, Maci recounts one night when things got particularly bad after Ryan called her a ‘b-tch’ to her face in front of his own mother. Jen tried to diffuse the situation, but Ryan walked away. Maci snapped and said: “‘He’s like this because you let him be. The only reason he acts like this is because you let him get away with it. You let him talk to you like this. You never make him do anything. You never tell him to be an adult.’ I really went off, loud and angry, and then I stormed off, too, and left her in tears,” she wrote.

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1. Maci’s Relationship with Ryan’s Fiance Mackenzie

Maci and Ryan’s relationship has come a long way since Bentley was born. They still have their hiccups, but Ryan is much more involved and a lot of that has to do with his fiance, Mackenzie Standifer. As a fellow teen mom, she understands his situation as a father and his ongoing relationship with Maci to co-parent Bentley. Viewers aren’t the only ones who’ve noticed a difference in Ryan, Maci has too and she gives Mackenzie her stamp of approval! “They genuinely care about each other. They have a very healthy relationship. I like her, so it has to be easier on him,” she joked. The open dialogue between Maci and Mackenzie has made Ryan and Maci’s co-parenting relationship much easier. Mackenzie and Ryan even attended Maci’s wedding to Taylor McKinney last fall!