Jeff and Jordan from season 11 of Big Brother have made it official to People magazine they are a couple.
For three months in the Big Brother house, theirs was the Showmance That Wasn’t. Jeff and Jordan had a chemistry that was undeniable but perplexing — although they made an adorable couple, their relationship seemed stuck at a perpetual slow boil.
Turns out getting back to the real world was just what they needed to turn up the heat because not only did BB 11 winner Jordan walk away with half a million dollars, she also walked out of the house with a best-friend-turned-boyfriend.
“Yes we are!” Jordan Lloyd, 23, tells PEOPLE when asked if she and Jeff Schroeder, 30, are finally an item. “We never really talked about it. It just kind of happened.”
The champ and America’s Favorite Player have been inseparable since the finale. For ad salesman Jeff, being away from the cameras and the competition opened his eyes to a different side of the small-town waitress who ended up capturing his heart.
“I liked her on the show, that was obvious,” he tells PEOPLE, “but after the show ended I liked her even more. I get in trouble when I say that, because Jordan is like, ‘You didn’t like me on the show, and now you like me!?’ but what I mean is that I like her even more now that I see who she is outside of the BB house.”
That includes what Jordan has decided to do with her newfound wealth, which is to stand by her pre-show promise and buy her mother a home. “Right after the show,” she says, “I got on the Internet, but I couldn’t find anything, and to make matters worse, my mom was being so picky. But I finally found something, and when my mom looked at it she fell in love with it!”
Another effect of Jordan’s run on the show, her newfound celebrity, came into play when sitting down with the builders of the house. “We closed on Wednesday,” she tells PEOPLE, “and I had put an offer on the house that was lower than what they were asking, and they took it because they were fans of the show, and they knew who I was. They just wanted an autograph, not even an autographed picture!”
And what does a new Lloyd family home mean for the happy couple? Well, for the first time in years, Jordan, who unabashedly admitted on national television to being forced to share a bedroom with her mother, finally has four walls to call her own. “I got my bed back!” she says. “My bed was at my best friend Chelsea’s house, and now I have that back for my room.”
After being locked up together for three months, and non-stop side-by-side, it’s hard for the pair to say that things have moved fast, but in the short period since season 11 ended, there have been trips to each other’s hometowns and meet-the-parents moments, although to these BB veterans, those weren’t big feats.
“I thought that the biggest hurdle in a relationship was taking a dump in front of each other,” Jeff says with a laugh. “We cleared that in the BB house. As far as the relationship goes we have a leg up. We’ve fast forwarded a year!”
As for whether or not things have gotten intimate, or to use Jordan’s bizarre euphemism, whether or not “booger” is in their immediate future, the Southern belle plays it close to her chest, and says with a laugh, “I think he’s waited long enough.”
– Reagan Alexander
