Rachel Riley said she struggled to keep her relationship with Pasha Kovalev going while he was buried in Strictly Come Dancing work, and she did not enjoy her own 2013 run on the show. She said the pair managed by fitting life around his schedule, not by pretending it was easy.
Speaking on Russell Howard's Five Brilliant Things, Riley said, “He's mega-busy.” She added of Kovalev, “He's like a zombie, like a shell of a human that's got nothing to say for himself.” Her own account of the show was equally blunt: “As soon as the music would start, I would have a fuzzy brain and it was like an out-of-body experience.”
2013 and December 2013
Riley competed on Strictly Come Dancing in 2013 and was paired with Kovalev. She said they confirmed they were together shortly after the series wrapped in December 2013, then married in a Las Vegas ceremony on 28 June 2019.
That timeline matters because it shows the relationship began inside the pressure of the production, not after it. Riley said Kovalev's schedule ran group dances right through to Christmas, which left him drained and made ordinary time together harder to protect.
Travelling around the workload
Riley said the couple kept things moving by working around the gaps. “So, as soon as he wasn't working, we kind of regrouped and we kept our relationship going by travelling in between the heavy workload,” she said. She also said she did not particularly enjoy Strictly, even though the show brought them together.
The practical detail here is the one that holds the story together: the relationship survived because they treated travel as a workaround, not a reward. That is the part worth noticing for anyone watching how entertainment schedules spill into private life; the workload was not abstract, it had to be managed week by week.
Weekly squash and date nights
Recently, Riley and Kovalev uncovered several minor hidden health surprises and turned squash into a weekly routine. Kovalev said, “We try to do it every week, at least once a week, we've been successful so far,” and added that he had never picked up a squash racket before joining her in the sport.
They also still dance on date nights, which is a neat coda to a story that began with dance becoming the problem. Riley is now a married partner looking back on a show that shaped the relationship but did not make it simple, and the sharper takeaway is that the pair built a routine around the strain instead of letting it set the terms.
