10 Photos of Melanie Vaz Lopes: Steven Bartlett Vows To Be 'Good Human' Following Secret Morocco Engagement

In the world of high-powered entrepreneurship and digital influence, personal relationships often remain carefully shrouded in mystery. Steven Bartlett, the 28-year-old founder of the wildly successful podcast The Diary of a CEO, has long been notoriously private about his romantic life—until now.

Over the Christmas holidays in Morocco, he proposed to Melanie Vaz Lopes, a French wellness entrepreneur and influencer he's known for seven years, setting in motion the culmination of a love story that involved a public declaration on stage, a choir singing Stevie Wonder, and three years of quietly saving engagement ring designs on Pinterest.

What makes this engagement particularly poignant is the transparency with which Bartlett has begun discussing a relationship he once kept entirely private. On the Hot Smart Rich podcast, he described his fiancée with a tenderness that reveals just how transformative this partnership has been for someone who spent years building an empire at the expense of his personal life.

'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,' Bartlett said, his tone suggesting something beyond typical celebrity romance. '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 Seven-Year Arc: From Breakup to Bali Redemption to Forever

The timeline of Bartlett and Vaz Lopes's relationship reads like a screenplay. They first met on Instagram in 2016, connecting through the platform's algorithmic serendipity. Within a year, they were dating. Yet within two years, their relationship fractured under the relentless demands of Bartlett's work schedule.

Between 'seven in the morning and nine o'clock at night,' he was simply unavailable—emotionally and physically—to sustain the relationship. They parted ways in 2017.

For four years, silence. Then, in February 2022, Bartlett made a dramatic gesture. He flew to Bali, where Vaz Lopes had relocated and was building her wellness empire. The visit lasted four days, but it shifted everything. Whatever Bartlett said or did during those Indonesian days reignited her faith in their future. She agreed to give them another chance, and from February 2022 onward, they've been inseparable.

But Bartlett wanted to make his commitment unmistakable to the world. During his Diary of a CEO tour, at a show Vaz Lopes was attending, he reportedly 'confessed his love for her' on stage. The staging was deliberately theatrical: the House Gospel Choir sang Stevie Wonder's 'I'll Be Loving You Always' as love-heart confetti descended from the ceiling.

It was the kind of grand gesture that might have seemed staged or maudlin from anyone else, yet from Bartlett it felt sincere—a man publicly acknowledging that his greatest business success paled in comparison to his relationship achievement.

The Ring: Three Years of Quiet Curation on Pinterest

What's perhaps most revealing about Bartlett's approach to the engagement is the meticulous care he invested in the ring itself. About four years ago, Vaz Lopes mentioned engagement rings in conversation with a friend.

Bartlett, 'looking over her shoulder,' began scrolling through her Pinterest board and noting which designs resonated with her. He created a digital folder in his phone—a curated collection of her aesthetic preferences, accumulated over years.

'So, I've had this folder in my phone for like three or four years of the ones she said she really liked,' he explained. 'And we were in New York, 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.'​

It's a small gesture, but it speaks volumes. Bartlett didn't commission some generic luxury band from a celebrity jeweller. He paid attention. He documented her preferences. He brought those preferences to a craftsperson and had the ring made specifically for her. In an era of impersonal luxury, it's remarkably human.

Vaz Lopes, now 33, is far from a merely decorative partner in this narrative. Born in Bordeaux, France, she founded Bali Breathwork, a wellness and retreat company that hosts seven-day women's only retreats focused on 'self-love, empowerment and sisterhood' across multiple global locations.

She's published her own raw and vegan recipe book, maintains a sports and nutrition guide, and has cultivated a devoted Instagram following of 138,000 people. She is, by any measure, a successful businesswoman in her own right.​

Bartlett has spoken about how Vaz Lopes represents qualities he aspires toward. 'She's what I'm aspiring to be more like. Mel helps me anchor. And then I'll have kids and a family and responsibilities and dependencies. And that's what I think it takes to be a good man, but also a good human being,' he said.​