Janette Manrara’s Aljaz Strictly backstory now carries a clearer timeline: before she married Aljaž Skorjanec in 2017, she had relationships with Pasha Kovalev and Artem Chigvintsev. That history sits alongside a marriage that started with a 2015 engagement and later widened into family life, including Lyra Rose in July 2023.
2010 to 2017 timeline
In 2010, Manrara was reportedly involved with Artem Chigvintsev, and before 2013 she had a brief romance with Pasha Kovalev. A source told the Sunday People in 2013 that she had dated two of the other Strictly dancers and said she enjoyed a brief romance with Pasha. The detail is straightforward, but the order matters: the relationships came before her engagement in 2015 and her London wedding in 2017.
Burn the Floor to London
Manrara and Skorjanec struck up a romance while touring with Burn the Floor, and she said they were friends for a whole year before their first date. He later said on Lorraine in 2022 that it was love at first sight for him, but not for Janette. Their relationship also had a practical strain once she joined Strictly Come Dancing in 2013, because she was living in Los Angeles and he was living in Slovenia.
2013 brought the distance
Manrara said in 2021 that the long-distance setup made the relationship hard for them, and that they were very scared about what was going to happen. She also said, “They called me first and asked me to join the show, I didn't scream but my face said it all. Within five minutes they called him straight after.” That sequence helps explain why the romance survived the early pressure: work, not timing, shaped the relationship from the start.
Lyra Rose after July 2023
By July 2023, Manrara and Skorjanec had welcomed their first child, Lyra Rose, which closes the loop on a relationship that moved from touring to distance to marriage and parenthood. The reported earlier romances now read less like gossip and more like the preface to a partnership that took shape in public and then settled into a family story.
