Spoilers for all episodes of The Ultimatum season 3 ahead. The rules of Netflix's dating reality TV show The Ultimatum are set up so its cast members can get a new perspective on what matrimony can be. The divisive premise: Split up couples and have them go through trial marriages with different people, before coming back together and deciding whether or not to take the plunge themselves. Typically, both boyfriend and girlfriend become preoccupied with their trial spouse, and at least spend less time thinking about their long-term partner with someone new. In The Ultimatum's third season, however, Sandy Gallagher and Nicholas Tramontin are the complete opposite.
After the season's shocking twist saw four cast members abandon the show without warning, Nick was left to spend the three-week trial period alone with his thoughts, while Sandy lived with a new trial husband. Nick and Sandy were already one of the season's most dramatic couples before this big shake-up made them the most buzz-worthy pair of the season. Below, read on for our breakdown of Sandy and Nick's time on The Ultimatum season 3, including any clues of whether their pair's relationship survived the show.
What happened between Sandy and Nick on 'The Ultimatum' season 3?
Nick, a 38-year-old artist who at one point calls himself "the Golden Ultimatum" issued the ultimatum to Sandy, a 27-year-old entrepreneur who counts Coachella as one of her yearly traditions. According to them, Nick was initially the guy that Sandy would drunk-call after a night out before their relationship got more serious over two and a half years. Nick says he's ready to settle down somewhere tranquil near a lake after 15 years of living in L.A. Sandy wants that life eventually, but right now she's at a completely different stage in life, still enjoying the city nightlife. Plus, according to her Instagram, she's a homeowner in Newport Beach, and would likely want to stay in the area.
On their last night together, both Nick and Sandy are prepared to start the process, with Nick even joking about "dumping her ass." Once the speed-dating starts, Nick quickly clicks with his fellow "weirdo" Vanessa, while Sandy has instant chemistry with her fellow Scorpio J.R. The nature of the two connections are very different; at one point Nick calls Vanessa his "kindred spirit," while J.R. and Sandy seem like a combination of intense physical attraction and bantering, light-hearted compatibility. It's also clear early on that J.R. and Nick push each other's buttons, especially during the first night's cocktail party where J.R. names Nick as the guy he wouldn't want to date his ex. When Nick later sees Sandy and J.R. flirting, he says he saw them get along quickly and that "it is what it is."
Both Nick and Vanessa's and Sandy and J.R.'s dates go well throughout the week, though J.R.'s a bit torn between pursuing a "totally different experience" with Sandy or a match with Aria, who's more similar to his original partner Zaina. Sandy and J.R. connect deeply at some points, but they also are the only new couple who share a kiss before the wife-swap (a.k.a. The Choice). When it comes time to partner up, Sandy makes it clear that she likes J.R. and Nick responds by subtly shading them for pursuing their "fun" connection rather than something more serious. He's intimidated that she opened up to J.R. so quickly when it took him a while at the start of their relationship. Their choices are the most contentious of the entire Choice dinner, as Sandy and J.R. choose each other, and Vanessa and Nick choose each other.
Once the trial marriages start, it quickly becomes obvious that Sandy and Nick won't be able to avoid each other for the three weeks. For one, all the couples live in the same building. Nick soon runs into Sandy on a coffee run, where she tells him off-camera that she and J.R. have already kissed. The information shakes Nick and Vanessa tries to comfort him while he's in his head. Sandy shares her side of the coffee interaction and says she gets why he's being emotional, but calling her over and over and being "disrespectful" is too much.
Vanessa doesn't have any testimonials during this stretch, so there's no way to know what was in Vanessa's head after this (unless she explains post-reunion). However, the next update we get is Vanessa abruptly leaving the show with her original partner Dave without a word. (Vanessa has since claimed that she did give Nick a heads up; for more on that, check out our Vanessa and Dave breakdown.) Nick feels understandably abandoned, and he's left alone in the process, as he and Mariah, whose trial spouse Micah also left with his original partner Chanel, decide to support each other as friends. Meanwhile, Sandy wants to focus on her trial marriage, but she admits this is a "recipe for disaster."
From this point on, Nick only has his solo painting time and occasional meet-ups with Mariah to distract him from constantly thinking about Sandy and worrying that she might be falling for J.R. He doesn't even know how well Sandy and J.R.'s trial marriage is going. He doesn't have the audience's view of them gushing over each other in confessionals and kissing by the pool, but what he's imagining could be even worse. And again, they're all living in the same building. He's apparently still calling Sandy nonstop, and one night, he can see her and J.R. have dinner together on their balcony from the ground outside.
The powder keg finally blows when Sandy takes J.R. to meet her mother and sisters. Everyone loves him, and Sandy's family isn't that fond of Nick. When Nick learns later that night that J.R. met the family, he loses it. We see clips of him calling over and over, her hanging up, him wailing like he's being tortured. He even goes to their place to try to get Sandy to leave with him, and both Sandy and J.R. feel that a line of respect has been crossed. It's all genuinely hard to watch, and you can't deny that Nick had to deal with a lot emotionally.
The first batch of episodes ends with the girls' and boys' nights out, just in case there hasn't been enough drama so far this season. The girls' side goes pretty smoothly; Sandy has nothing but great things to say about J.R. to his original partner Zaina, and she tells Zaina that they're not hooking up. Surprisingly, Mariah points out that Nick is just wallowing or distracting himself rather than dealing with his emotions, and she tells Sandy that she doesn't think he'd make a good husband. (Sometimes the youngest of us are the wisest.)
Nick begins the guys' night by apologizing to J.R. before he even sits down. J.R. doesn't verbally accept the apology and instead mentions how Nick showed up at their door, saying that he "lost all respect" for him at that moment. It's a very tough love talk, but it seems as though someone other than J.R. needs to be the one to tell Nick how his obsessive behavior isn't appropriate. Then by the end of the night, Mariah gets Nick to admit that his emotional volatility has been overwhelming, and when J.R. and Sandy meet up at home, she starts crying about not wanting to go back to Nick.
Nick and Sandy's reunion starts from a contentious point at the Changeover, or when the cast members switch to their second trial marriages with their original partners. Once again, J.R. gushes over Sandy and says she "went through Hell" with Nick contacting her repeatedly. Nick takes offense to the notion that Sandy wasn't also reaching out to him, but she argues that Nick's obsessive behavior kept getting worse and that he "tormented" her throughout the trial marriage. She says he went from "completely neglecting me [before the show] to love-bombing me." Once Sandy and Nick are in their apartment, they keep having the same argument about the issues in their relationship outside of the Ultimatum process.
Ultimatum fans on Reddit have theorized that over-editing may have caused the tonal whiplash and confusion in Sandy and Nick's trial marriage. The scenes swing from Sandy sharing her concerns with Nick to him comforting her as she's crying in bed to their latest blow-up fight in a way that none of the moments seem connected. When all the couples reunite for the first time after the Changeover, Nick learns from Zaina that J.R. and Sandy had kissed a second time. He responds to the news by having another meltdown and leaving the apartment to talk it out in a testimonial interview rather than communicating with Sandy. When he returns to the room, Sandy says she intended to tell him about the kiss after filming was completed. In the next scene at the start of episode 8, it's morning and Sandy is lecturing a despondent Nick about how if she was in his shoes during the trial marriage, she would have shown him more respect.
When Nick and Sandy share updates with Sandy's mom about where they're at during dinner, it sounds like nothing has changed over the past few dramatic weeks. Sandy admits that he's showing up in the ways she wanted to before they arrived on the show, but she is still on the fence about whether he would continue to show up in a marriage. Nick admits that he had been distant before filming, but he doesn't explain why besides saying he was scared. There have been so many scenes showing how Nick and Sandy have communication and honesty issues, that we're just left to trust their assurances that marriage could be a good idea for them.
Do Sandy and Nick get engaged on 'The Ultimatum' season 3?
Sandy and Nick's Ultimatum Day, or the final ceremony where they either get engaged or break up, is an emotional rollercoaster. There's a brief pre-finale cliffhanger where J.T. and Sandy meet up first, but any casual Bachelor fan knows that the first one up at the finale ceremony is never a yes. Sandy gently makes it clear she's not leaving with J.R., they wish each other well, and then they go off to their actual, soon-to-be-ex partners.
Once Nick and Sandy start talking, it seems they could make the objectively wrong choice for both of them and get engaged. But then Nick goes for his jacket pocket and the, "What are you doing?" that comes out of Sandy's mouth sounds knee-jerk and scared. Nick recognizes that she's still hesitant; even when Sandy's the one saying, "I want nothing more than to walk out of here engaged with you," Nick is the one to say that love isn't enough if she still has big doubts. So, after everything, Nick is the one to break up with Sandy. (This relationship has been a season of confusion.)
Are Sandy and Nick still together after 'The Ultimatum' season 3?
Nick and Sandy both attend the season 3 reunion and are still broken up. Before the exes can get into it, Vanessa returns to share her side of her and Nick's brief trial marriage, which she describes as a nightmare where he got "ugly" and lashed out at her. Nick doesn't deny anything Vanessa claims, even when she says that Nick probably has some unresolved trauma he hasn't dealt with.
As for Nick and Sandy, Nick says he was going for a piece of paper, not a ring, when he reached into his jacket on Ultimatum Day. He adds that he "begged and pleaded" with Sandy for them to "figure this out" once filming ended, and soon after, Nick went into recovery for drinking too much. He claims that Sandy ended things with him a week into recovery, while Sandy says they ended things on Ultimatum Day. During the reunion, we hear more of Nick's side than Sandy's, but she does cry as he admits that he had been "bombarding" her emotionally during her trial marriage with J.R.
Sandy doesn't get much time to share her side, beyond defending herself against accusations that she and J.R. misrepresented their connection. There's no word on Sandy's dating status, but Nick says he's currently dating someone "wonderful."
What have Sandy and Nick said about 'The Ultimatum' season 3?
Before the reunion, Sandy began posting her way through season 3's airing on TikTok, with references and reactions to the show. In one clip, she lowers her head in embarrassment as a title card reads, "Trust me no one can judge me as hard as I've judged myself." Meanwhile, in the comments of a reaction clip filmed with her mom (where one of Nick's paintings is seen on the wall behind them), Sandy replied to a fan, "There is so so much that is not shown in the scene with him coming to our apartment!"
Sandy also shared her side of the show's drama in a Dec. 11 interview with Elite Daily. She argued that her and Nick's relationship was "completely different" before they arrived on the show, so much so that she initially wondered whether he was putting on an "act for the cameras."
"He was very disconnected from me," she told the outlet. "My friends were actually surprised that he was the one giving me 'the ultimatum' because I was always the one crying for his attention and wanting more from him as a partner. He never showed up for me."
She continued, “Once we started this experience, he instantly flipped...Looking back now, I know it was genuine and he was really struggling. But it was such a drastic shift from one extreme to another. What I was experiencing before going to the show was the extreme side of the neglect. And then this was the whole other extreme.”
Nick didn't directly address the show post-filming until the finale. However, he did release an Instagram Reel "expressing his disappointment for negative comments" that Sandy and the cast have received since season 3's premiere. "We all signed up to do something wildly difficult...Clearly, you guys saw that it didn't work out so well for me, but that doesn't mean that the people who were involved in my situation are bad people. We have to treat each other with care, love, and respect," he said.
