Kristen Doute Makes It Instagram Official With New Boyfriend Alex Menache! Plus Kristen Explains Why Their Relationship Is Different — And How It Affected Her Friendship With Ex-Boyfriend Brian Carter!

Kristen Doute has made her relationship with her new boyfriend Alex Menache official on Instagram. “Pretty fly for tie dye. ✌🏽💙,” the Vanderpump Rules star wrote alongside a selfie with Menache walking behind her in Los Angeles.

Scheana Shay was quick to celebrate Doute making her relationship Instagram official. “This makes my heart so happy! You deserve all the happiness in the world my love,” Shay commented in the post, according to Us Weekly. “You have such a big heart and always give and put others first! It’s YOUR turn to be happy!!!!! @menache2society ❤️❤️❤️ all the feels.”

Doute also got candid about her relationship with Menache while promoting her upcoming book, He’s Making You Crazy. “I don’t want a boyfriend that I have to do that to anymore,” Doute said. “He and I started hanging out toward the end of [writing] the book. So he is actually in a few of the chapters,” Doute shared.

“He is very, very aware of every single thing in this book and I thought that was really important going into this relationship because I hold this relationship so sacred. I really took my time with Alex and I really had to just lay it all out there and say this is who I am. This is what I’ve been through. You have a choice to make and either way it’s cool.”

Doute added that it’s “refreshing” for Menache to already know the details of her past relationships, which are detailed in the book.

“Hopefully we get a season 9 an, you know, if he’s my boyfriend, he’ll be a part of the show because it’s a part of my life and I don’t want there to be any surprises,” she told Us. “I don’t want him to be caught off guard by anything anyone might say. So he knows every last detail.”

Meanwhile, her relationship with ex-boyfriend Brian Carter is now estranged. “It’s difficult. I mean, we definitely are cordial. We’re friendly,” she said. “[We’re] coparenting with my dogs. There’s a chapter about that [in the book]. But we’re cordial and friendly enough.”

Doute noted that she told Carter about Menache before she made their relationship Instagram official.

“He’s known about Alex and I since before I went public with it. And that definitely created a strain,” she told Us. “But I know he’s dating as well now. And I think [hearing that] was as hard as it was for me to just come out and tell him, like, I am dating someone else. And I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. But I had to keep on my self-love journey and live my truth and live the life that I want to live regardless of how it made someone else feel. So I handled it a bit with kid gloves. We don’t talk very often. And I think that’s the healthiest thing for both of us right now. But maybe one day.”

Doute and Menache have been getting to know each other as he splits his time between her home and his amid the coronavirus pandemic. Kristen referred to Alex as her “quarantine babe” on a podcast earlier this month.

“[He is] someone that I had been friends with and it was kind of like a drunken night and I was like, ‘Hey, we’ve been friends and you’re hot. We should probably make out.’ And so we did and we just kind of started hanging out because we were both single,” she told Lindsey Metselaar on the We Met at Acme podcast, noting that she doesn’t see the need to “rush into anything.”

Photo Credit: Instagram