The flowers arrived with no name on the card — just one sentence: “Go live your best life. Wishing you all the happiness you deserve.” Shauna Rae was 23, three-foot-ten, and used to men studying her “like I’m a specimen in a lab.” Then a stranger from a small town in Wales did something none of them had done: he watched her whole first season, and instead of staring, he sent flowers. Three weeks later, he got on a plane.
A Stranger in Wales Watched Season 1 — and Sent Flowers
Dan Swygart was 26, an entrepreneur from Ruthin in Denbighshire, Wales, according to reports. He had watched the first season of I Am Shauna Rae and, by his own account, was struck not by how Shauna looked but by her emotional strength. So he sent the flowers, with that one-line note, and they started messaging. Then he did the part nobody expected: in December 2022, Dan flew across the Atlantic to meet her in person in Long Island — no matchmaker, no producer arranging it.
December in Long Island: Sushi, an Aquarium, and a Grilling
The visit played out like a montage: an aquarium and an escape room with her younger sister Rylee, paddle boarding on a bright winter day, and one evening at her house making sushi rolls — the night that became the most famous date of the whole show. It was also the night her parents’ protectiveness went on full display. Patty and Mark grilled Dan over the sushi; they had said on the show that they feared Shauna’s childlike appearance would attract predators. The trip ended at a charity event where Shauna was bartending, and Dan asked her for a dance.
The Word That Ended It: “Creep”
Then the episodes aired, and the internet did what it does worst. Clips of the dates flooded YouTube, and the comments went hard: “I don’t know about this guy… I still think it’s creepy.” “Guy 100% has a fetish.” The arithmetic of the outrage was strange — Dan was 26 and Shauna was 23, three years apart — but the seeming age gap was all anyone could see. Dan answered back on Instagram, defending not just himself but her right to date at all. “As soon as you say that she can’t have a real-world connection with someone else, you dehumanize her,” he said. A year later, he told WalesOnline the price of it plainly: “I had a lot of death threats and a lot of people hating me from the Shauna Rae stuff.”
The Dance, the Distance, and the Goodbye That Wasn’t a Breakup
For all the noise, the romance itself ended quietly. Dan flew back to the UK, and the two decided they were better off as friends. Shauna admitted she had never really pictured what a relationship with Dan would look like — and long distance was not her thing. “It’s not my cup of tea,” she said. In March 2023, Dan hinted the door was not fully shut, saying they were “still good friends, getting to know each other.” By 2024, he had moved on to E4’s Love Triangle, saying openly why he took it: “Changing that narrative was obviously important for me.”
What the Storm Left Behind
Here is the part of the story that still runs Shauna’s life in 2026. She has been with a boyfriend since around 2022, according to reports — and nobody has ever seen his face. On the Unplanned podcast in January 2025, she explained the rule in plain terms: she worries about backlash reaching his job, and his face will stay off the internet “unless I’m marrying him.” The life she runs herself now is built behind that wall. Living on her own terms at 27 means never letting the crowd audition her boyfriend again.
YOU MAY LIKEThe Baby Cancer Battle That Made Her 3-Foot-10: Shauna Rae’s Full Health JourneyDan flew 3,000 miles and got death threats for it, and Shauna has kept every boyfriend since then completely off camera. So tell us straight: were the fans who called Dan a creep protecting Shauna — or did they destroy the one romance brave enough to cross an ocean for her?
