For Witney Carson, a professional dancer on DANCING WITH THE STARS, romance began with a mountain road, a stuck car and a prayer beside the man who would become her husband.
“The marriage shouldn’t be hard. Life is hard,” Carson said in a PEOPLE video posted Sept. 1, 2026, as she and her husband, Carson McAllister, looked back on their long love story.
Their story starts in junior high, when McAllister says he fell for Carson before she even knew who he was. By the end of their junior year, he had started dating her friends as a roundabout way to get her attention.
It worked. At 17, the two began dating, and their first date took them into the mountains for a fire and an off-roading adventure that quickly went sideways. Their vehicle slid to roughly a 45-degree angle, they had no cell service and Carson feared they might have to walk down the mountain.
McAllister worked on the vehicle while Carson watched, and then she asked if they could pray. After they got unstuck, Carson said the moment revealed something important about the man she was dating.
“Really just stick with his faith,” Carson said in the video. The couple’s first-date story is funny, but Carson also makes clear that faith entered the relationship in a very practical way: it shaped how they handled a frightening problem.
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The relationship still had its awkward stretches. Carson was the first to kiss McAllister and tell him she loved him, while he admitted that he held back because he was nervous after waiting so long to date her.
After high school, McAllister spent two years in Romania on a mission with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, while Carson pursued dance in Los Angeles. The Knot previously reported that the long-distance years tested the couple, but they eventually found their way back to each other and began building a life together.
That life included a proposal worthy of a dance pro’s love story. In 2015, McAllister and his father spent the day digging out a heart-shaped space in the sand at Manhattan Beach, where Carson arrived expecting dinner with her mother and instead found McAllister, a white tent, music and both families waiting nearby, according to the video and an E! News interview.
The couple married on New Year’s Day 2016 in the Salt Lake City area. Their wedding included family, friends and several DANCING WITH THE STARS pros, while Alfonso Ribeiro’s sons served as ring bearers, PEOPLE reported in its wedding coverage.
Carson also choreographed a dance with her decidedly non-dancer husband to Run-DMC’s “It’s Tricky.” The routine became one of the couple’s favorite memories, partly because their guests had never seen McAllister dance before.
Today, the couple are parents to sons Leo and Jet, and they are expecting their third child, PEOPLE reported. Carson plans to compete on the upcoming season of DANCING WITH THE STARS while pregnant, and USA TODAY confirmed that she will return for Season 35 with partner Guillermo Rodriguez.
The family news gives the older relationship story a fresh frame. Carson has already shown that she is willing to make major career decisions around her family; Movieguide® previously reported that she stepped away from DANCING WITH THE STARS in 2023 after praying about the choice and deciding that her young son needed stability.
In the PEOPLE video, Carson says the couple protects their marriage by communicating about their needs, wants and dreams, supporting each other and setting aside intentional time together. That can mean a trip for two, but it can also mean the small gestures that keep a busy household from becoming merely a shared schedule.
McAllister describes the deepest connection as the end of a long day, when the work is done and the two can come back together.
“We have each other. We’re so blessed,” he said.
For the couple, the years have brought distance, career pressure, children and plenty of chaos. Their answer has been neither a perfect marriage nor a painless life, but faith, communication and the daily decision to remain on the same team.
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