Perhaps the biggest surprise of Jonathan Joly and Anna Saccone’s wedding day was that filming stopped at the bridal suite door.
The YouTube vloggers, who went on to release videos of all four of their children being born, were already sharing endless footage of their day-to-day lives when they tied the knot on Italy’s Amalfi Coast in September 2011.
But at least the newlyweds had enough taste to refrain from consummating their marriage in front of the cameras for their growing army of subscribers.
Over a ten-year period the couple, who were raised in separate parts of Ireland before later studying at Arts University Bournemouth, were to rack up a staggering 2,900 videos of their apparently enviable family life. Their daily updates quickly started bringing in the sort of money that would see their estimated net wealth reach over £1million ($1.3million).
Fast-forward to 2025 and their often excruciating domestic clips are once more a regular fixture on social media. But much else has changed.
Their original YouTube channel, The SacconeJolys, has effectively been inactive since 2020 – although many of the home videos they removed two years later have since reappeared on the platform.
Nowadays Mr Joly and Ms Saccone, who live in a seven-bedroom Surrey mansion with their children, largely broadcast separately to their millions of followers.
Almost inevitably, this has triggered a barrage of unhelpful conjecture about the state of their marriage. On the online forum Reddit, one user speculated: ‘I do think a divorce is on the horizon’ – adding that ‘Anna was quite young when they got together’.
Jonathan Joly and Anna Saccone with their four children
Mr Joly was named Celebrity Dad of the Year over Prince William and Declan Donnelly in 2019
In a reference to the couple’s 11-year-old daughter Edie, who was previously known to viewers as a boy, another individual remarked: ‘With all the scrutiny the family’s been under since their child transitioned, I wouldn’t be surprised if it put a strain on their relationship.’
Speculation continued in a similar vein until Ms Saccone recorded a TikTok video called ‘Are We Divorced?’ in which she described the rumours about her marriage as ‘the elephant in the room that I was not aware of’.
The 37-year-old suggested that the couple’s priorities when it comes to what they ought to share online had changed, but stressed: ‘We’ve always had separate [social media] channels and we’ve always kind of liked that because it gives us our own creative control.
‘I actually show Jonathan quite a lot in my content… I appear quite a lot in his content.
‘I don’t really understand where this rumour is coming from. I think people have just got super-used to us vlogging every single day and being together every day. Now with us having our separate platforms, this just seems really foreign to some people.
‘But behind closed doors, our relationship is absolutely fine.’
Her voice cracking and briefly looking as if she might break down, Ms Saccone – whose recent videos have included soul-searching conversations with her gay friend Matthew Gray – continued: ‘I don’t really know what to say to prove it to you guys.
‘He’s [Jonathan] my soulmate, he’s my person, I would not want to do life without him. I’m really sorry to disappoint those of you out there that really wanted the drama. We’re still together, we’re not getting a divorce anytime soon.’
For his part, Mr Joly, 45 – who admitted in his 2022 memoir All My Friends Are Invisible that he had ‘wanted to be a girl’ when growing up – has previously spoken of his relief that Ms Saccone ‘didn’t run away’ when he revealed his gender identity issues in the early days of their relationship.
The couple met in Dublin in 2007, the year after Anna’s father Eduardo – an Italian-born professor of literature – was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
In a blog, she later wrote that it ‘felt like my world was crashing down around me’ – a situation presumably not helped by a previous romantic relationship with ‘someone who wasn’t very supportive, who ignored me and made me feel I wasn’t good enough’.
Meanwhile, she found herself in the grip of an eating disorder – bulimia – as a way of ‘dealing or coping with things’. It was a symptom, she suggested years later, of ‘a need for order and perfection in a world which I seemed to be losing control of’.
It was against that backdrop that her future husband, a tattooed motorcycle enthusiast eight years her senior, entered the 19-year-old’s life. While Ms Saccone’s father was unimpressed at first, even telling Anna that ‘this is not the man I thought you’d end up with’, he later forged a strong relationship with Mr Joly.
Sadly, Professor Saccone died almost two years before his daughter’s marriage. The wedding video itself appears curiously unemotional, even slightly staged and soulless.
True to form, though, Jonathan Joly appears highly animated through the 18-minute recording. ‘I’m about to get married,’ he trills at the beginning, ‘and I’ve never felt happier’.
Later on, he chirps to Anna: ‘It’s been a whirlwind of a day. I can’t believe we’re married. What the hell?!!’ With a blank-looking expression on her face, the new bride simply replies: ‘I know…I know.’
