When Paige DeSorbo turned 30, she was shocked by the “crazy shift” that occurred. “People treat you differently,” she tells me, leaning back into a couch in her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Dressed in head-to-toe sweats—a matching set, of course—the reality TV star is clear-eyed: “They expect different things from you. And when you’re a guy, they don’t.”
She bristles at the double standard she’s observed. “I have a ton of guy friends who are turning 40, single, no kids, and it’s like, ‘You’re such a hot bachelor.’ I mention I want to get a second cat, and it’s like, ‘She’s crazy.’”
The expectations in question are mostly about marriage and motherhood, and at 32, DeSorbo is bucking any related stereotypes. She’s newly single, living alone in a CB2-designed “dream” apartment, and her career is skyrocketing. Her podcast tour with co-host Hannah Berner sold out Radio City Music Hall (twice!), and the duo has an advice book coming out in April.
Plus, Summer House, the Bravo show that DeSorbo has starred in since 2019, and where she publicly cemented her friendship with Berner, is about to premiere its ninth season. She’s so busy that she barely has time to hop on Zoom to chat with me between a Galentine’s-themed Amazon Live and a fitting at Christian Siriano ahead of the designer’s New York Fashion Week show, where DeSorbo would sit front row, alongside Katie Holmes and Julianne Hough. A fashion lover through and through, she’ll also soon launch a curated collection at DSW, and she teases a mystery design project coming later this year. “I really feel like it’s my baby,” she says, noting it’s been in the works for the better part of two years.
Talking to DeSorbo is like listening to her podcast, Giggly Squad, which is to say, you feel like you’ve gone from strangers to fast friends in about five minutes. Shortly after starting the interview, we’re laughing about how she “faked” her way into the style world: “The Anna Delvey of fashion,” she quips about herself. (Appropriately, DeSorbo and Berner’s hit show gets its name from a pejorative comment that fellow Summer House castmate Kyle Cooke threw at the pair while they were laughing during a dinner scene in season 4.) The podcast is a mix of unfiltered, lighthearted banter between two besties, as well as more serious, confessional conversations.
DeSorbo seems intent on closing the gap between her access as a celebrity and who she feels she is at her core: just a girl. A girl who grew up right outside of Albany, New York, falling in love with fashion because of her stylish mom, and attempting to recreate the outfits she saw in magazines with Forever 21 finds. A girl who started out as an assistant to a VP at ABC News and had dreams of being a reporter. A girl who now has a massive platform—1.4 million followers on Instagram alone—and can say the things out loud that other girls are thinking. In a September episode of Giggly Squad, DeSorbo spoke about having a panic attack for the first time in her life right before going onstage to perform. In another, she disclosed that she had been in an abusive relationship when she was 19 years old, something that had previously been a source of shame for her. “I [had] the same personality back then as I do now,” she says. “And I think all my friends saw me as like, ‘Oh, well, Paige is so confident, and she wouldn’t let a man tell her anything.’ But I did.” After both episodes, she says she received an outpouring of support from women who had similar experiences. “[Our listeners] really helped me, more I think than I helped them.”
These conversations have created an intimacy between DeSorbo and Giggly Squad listeners, nicknamed “Gigglers,” that she says she doesn’t have with Summer House fans. (After all, it was the Giggler FLOTUS interns who got her and Berner an invite to the White House last year.)
“When girls come up to me on the street, if they say they’re a Giggler, I’m immediately like, ‘We’re the same person,’” she says. “Whereas if someone comes up and says, ‘I love you on Summer House,’ I’m like, ‘Thank you so much.’” On Summer House, people are getting a highly curated version of her, but on Giggly Squad, “you’re getting all of me, unedited and exactly what I thought in that moment.”
Maybe that’s why DeSorbo sees Giggly Squad and fashion as her professional focuses, rather than reality TV. She tells me that the podcast is her “safe space,” and that she and Berner will “do Giggly Squad ’til we’re literally 85.” They already have tons of ideas about ways that the brand could spin off into other ventures. TV shows? A podcast network? A platform to elevate other women’s voices? The sky’s the limit. But when I ask about the future of Summer House and specifically her own longevity as a cast member, DeSorbo is unbothered. “I never tried to be on reality TV,” she says. “So I’m not trying to stay on it either. It fit in my life perfectly when I started. And if it continues to fit, then I’ll continue to do it.”
She understands that there will probably come a day where she isn’t interested in going out to the Hamptons every single weekend and binge drinking three nights in a row, because, as she puts it, “I’ll die.” She also knows that with or without her, Summer House will survive, because “there’s always going to be degenerate 20-year-olds that wanna party.” Maybe one day the show will be canceled. Maybe there will be a city-centric spin-off at some point, à la The Valley. She’s open to it all.
Season 9, which premieres tonight, will be for the girls, or at least that’s how DeSorbo experienced it in real time. She says that watching fellow castmate Lindsay Hubbard—whom she has historically had a contentious relationship with—go through her first pregnancy brought them closer. “I’d never really been around a pregnant person before, where I’m seeing them weekly,” DeSorbo tells me. “We were watching her grow, asking her all of these questions.” (It also didn’t hurt that Hubbard’s pregnancy was the perfect excuse for staying in and “bed rotting,” the activity that DeSorbo and fellow Summer House stars Amanda Batula and Ciara Miller tend to favor over going out.)
She fondly recalls a moment during filming when two new cast members on Summer House, both women, were arguing about something while she and Hubbard stood off to the side. “I was just like, ‘Lindsay, they could never be us, never fight like us,’” DeSorbo says, referring to the pair’s historic blowouts. “It was funny to see how full circle we’ve really come…we had such a girl summer. And I don’t think the boys really even picked up on what was going on with us.”
But as her friendships were gelling together in new and profound ways last summer, her romantic life was careening towards a fissure. DeSorbo dated fellow Bravo star Craig Conover, a core cast member on Southern Charm, for three years. The pair was beloved by fans, who were eager to see them move in together and get married. And then, suddenly, DeSorbo announced their breakup on her podcast at the end of December 2024. She spoke lovingly of Conover, calling him “the best boyfriend [she’s] ever had,” and framing their decision to part ways as a matter of mismatched visions of the future. “I love him, I think he loves me, I think we will remain friends,” she said. “No one did anything…I think we both were just being really mature and saying what we want and what we didn’t want.”
Being in a public relationship can be a boon for a star’s personal brand, but it also comes with rabid fan surveillance—and fans are notoriously fickle. After DeSorbo and Conover’s split became public, people became ravenous, hunting for a villain. Fans deduced that DeSorbo had been the one to initiate the breakup, and rumors began swirling. Had DeSorbo immediately moved on with a new boyfriend? Had she cheated on Conover? On an early February episode of Giggly Squad, DeSorbo addressed the online scuttlebutt, categorically denying it all. “In the three years that I dated my ex-boyfriend, I never physically cheated on him, emotionally cheated on him,” she said, making clear her frustration that Conover had not publicly defended her against these charges. “I did not move on with some new guy. I am single. I don’t have a new boyfriend…I decided that I did not want to go forth with that relationship, but no one was blindsided, no one was cheated on.”
During that same podcast episode, DeSorbo said that she wouldn’t be speaking about the breakup again. But thanks to the Bravo-verse, the speculation will likely continue. Viewers can retroactively trace the cracks in DeSorbo and Conover’s relationship on the current season of Southern Charm, and they will be able to do the same throughout season 9 of Summer House. On February 6, Conover appeared on Watch What Happens Live and spoke about the breakup from his perspective in a now-viral clip, saying that they “didn’t want different things, she just wanted other people, and that’s fine.” A mid-season teaser for Southern Charm shows Conover talking to his castmates about the fact that he had bought an engagement ring for DeSorbo, and a scene at the very end of the Summer House premiere is likely to raise even more eyebrows and inquiries.
DeSorbo declined to comment on the breakup or Conover’s recent comments for this interview. Instead, she’s focused on her next chapter, both personally and professionally. When I ask her what she might want from a future romantic partner, she doesn’t mince words: “Nothing. I want literally nothing from them.”
What she means is that she wants a relationship that just fits. Her panic attacks were a “very big wake-up call” that encouraged DeSorbo to take stock of her life and what might not be working. “I feel like if you make a hard decision for yourself, the universe really does reward you,” she says. “As long as I keep making decisions that are good for me…and are good for my career and good for my relationships, the universe will put it on a silver platter and give it to me.” This core belief helps her drown out the cultural “noise” about not being married or having kids yet. In terms of finding the right partner, she muses, “Maybe he’s busy doing something too, you know?”
DeSorbo is also about to start the egg-freezing process, with the same doctor Hubbard used. She knows that she wants to be a mother down the road, but that road is long and winding. “There’s this thing where women aren’t allowed to change their mind,” she says. “And I feel that with the kid thing a lot—people being like, ‘You said you wanted to get married and you wanted to have a baby [young].’ And I’m like, Okay, well, I also used to go in a tanning bed.”
As we’re wrapping up our call, DeSorbo interrupts me. “Your apartment looks so cute,” she says, pointing to the bits of my Brooklyn bedroom she can see over Zoom. “I meant to tell you that.” I thank her (there instantly feels like no higher praise) and make a mental note to look up the loungewear brand she promises will become my new obsession.
And, for a moment, there we are. Just two girls.
Hair by Jackie Seabrooke; makeup by Taylor Fitzgerald; styling by Paige DeSorbo.
