The French-Portuguese yoga entrepreneur shared a close-up of her oval-cut diamond on Instagram Stories, paired with a simple, breathless caption. “Mon amour.” No ring selfie essay. No carousel of behind-the-scenes snaps. Just a glittering stone and a phrase that said everything.
For fans of Steven, the man who built a media empire on radical honesty through his hit podcast “The Diary of a CEO,” this engagement is a rare peek inside the one part of his life he has fiercely protected. His relationship with Melanie has mostly existed off camera, away from his studio lights and the “Dragons’ Den” chairs.
‘Diary of a CEO’ Dragon Plans a Proposal
Steven chose to talk about the proposal for the first time on the “Hot Smart Rich” podcast hosted by Maggie Sellers Reum. There, the usually in-control business mogul sounded almost shy as he lifted the curtain on the woman he credits with keeping him grounded.
He described Melanie, who runs a breathwork and yoga retreat in Bali, as the one person who truly sees every side of him. “She knows me better than anybody, because she gets to see it all. When she says things, I listen very intently. She’s very special.”
Then he went further, revealing just how much she has shaped him. “In many respects, she’s like everything that I’m not. She’s like an angel that fell from the sky. That’s kind of how I describe it to my friends.”
The couple have been together for almost seven years, a quiet, steady presence in a world where many high-profile romances burn fast and bright. “We’ve been together for almost seven years now, and she’s very much what I’m aspiring to be. She’s what I’m aspiring to be more like.”
From Instagram DM to Ride or Die
Their story did not start on a red carpet or in a boardroom. It started on Instagram in 2016. Two people whose careers revolve around social media found each other there, then promptly decided to keep what they had far away from the spotlight that feeds their work.
While Steven built his reputation as a brutally honest business voice and the youngest Dragon on “Dragons’ Den,” and Melanie cultivated a wellness community around her Bali retreat, their romance stayed largely offline. No constant couple content, no performative declarations. Just two people moving between London, Los Angeles and Bali, building a life in the in between moments.
It was not always smooth. After a year of dating, Steven ended the relationship to focus on the business empire that would help make him one of the UK’s most talked about entrepreneurs. For many couples, that would have been the end of the story.
Instead, it became the turning point. Realising he could not live without her, Steven got on a plane and flew around 22 hours to Bali, where Melanie runs her retreat, to win her back. It worked. Their relationship, by all accounts, has only strengthened since.
The Secret Folder in His Phone
For all his wealth and influence, Steven did not outsource the romance. He quietly built the proposal around tiny details Melanie had shared over time, storing them away like a meticulous founder collecting crucial data points.
He revealed that the ring was not a last-minute splurge. It was a four-year project that lived in a hidden folder on his phone. “About four years ago, she was talking about engagement rings with a friend, and I was looking over her shoulder and looking at the ones she liked, and I was looking at her Pinterest, and saving the ones she said she really liked.”
Then came the big move. After years of collecting her dream designs, he finally took that secret inspiration board to a jeweller in New York that his most trusted friends recommended. “So, I’ve had this folder in my phone for like three or four years of the ones she said she liked. And we were in New York yesterday, and there’s a jeweller in New York that some of my friends that I really trust told me to go see, and they made the ring for us.”
The result is the oval-cut diamond now lighting up Melanie’s hand and lighting up social feeds, a stone that is less about its carats and more about the hours of quiet attention he paid to what she loved.
Morocco, Christmas and One Perfect “Yes”
The proposal itself unfolded during a festive getaway in Morocco. It was there that Steven finally presented the diamond ring he had spent years designing and asked Melanie to marry him. She said yes, turning a long-planned surprise into the next chapter of their already international love story.
Soon after, Melanie gave the world its first close look at the ring. No professional shoot, no glossy magazine reveal. Just an Instagram Story, the diamond catching the light, with “Mon amour” written over the image.
Sources close to the couple say that after living together in both London and Los Angeles while navigating demanding careers on different continents, they have never been happier and are excited to begin planning their wedding.
The Woman Who Grounds a Media Empire
To understand why this engagement feels so significant, you have to look at the life Steven has built. Born in Botswana and raised in the UK from the age of two, he left university at 18 to chase a business dream that almost cost him his relationship with his family. He has spoken about how his mother was “heartbroken” when he walked away from the education she never had.
That risk paid off. Steven co founded the social media marketing agency The Social Chain, which was valued at $300million when it first entered the stock market. His company Steven.com, home to his media ventures including the firm Flight Story, has been valued at $320 million.
On top of that, his podcast “The Diary of a CEO” regularly tops UK charts and pulls in millions of streams each month, with guests ranging from Kamala Harris to Louis Tomlinson, Davina McCall, Lewis Capaldi and Simon Cowell. He is also the youngest Dragon on BBC’s “Dragons’ Den,” sitting alongside Peter Jones and Deborah Meaden as he invests in new and emerging businesses.
Steven has said that the growth of his company will help him “build the Disney of the creator economy,” referring to the multi-billion-pound world of influencers and digital creators. It is an empire that could easily swallow someone’s entire identity.
Which is why his words about Melanie land with a different kind of weight. Beneath the numbers and valuations, he is clear about what really anchors him.
“Mel Helps Me Anchor”
For a man who talks for a living, Steven becomes almost disarmingly emotional when he speaks about the future he wants with Melanie. He admitted that, for a long time, he feared a version of success that looked powerful from the outside but felt deeply lonely inside.
He confessed that he once imagined himself as the successful man in a big house with no one to share it with. Today, that image has been replaced by something entirely different. “Mel helps me anchor. And then I’ll have kids and a family and responsibilities and dependencies.”
He did not frame those responsibilities as a burden. He framed them as the point. “And that’s what I think it takes to be a good man, but also a good human being. I’m very excited about depending on other people and having other people depend on me.”
For someone as relentlessly driven as Steven, it is telling that he describes Melanie not just as his partner, but as his role model. She is, in his words, what he is “aspiring to be” more like. The high-powered Dragon who mentors founders around the world is looking across the dinner table for his own inspiration.
A Love Story Built Like a Start Up
In some ways, this engagement story reads exactly how you would expect from a self-made multimillionaire who turned his life into a case study on discipline. The long-term planning. The secret Pinterest research. The trusted New York jeweller. The Moroccan backdrop. It is strategic romance with a founder’s brain behind it.
In other ways, it is surprisingly soft. Two people who met in the noisy chaos of social media and then chose silence. A proposal that took four years, not because of hesitation, but because he paid attention when she pointed at a ring on a screen years ago. A man known for interrogating other people’s lives on a chart-topping podcast, finally speaking, gently, about his own.
Somewhere in Steven Bartlett’s phone, there is a folder full of screenshots that only he and his jeweller have seen. The world will likely never scroll through it. It does not matter. The only image that counts now is the one on Melanie’s hand, an oval cut spark of light that marks the moment a Dragon decided that the most valuable investment he would ever make was in forever.
