Joy-Anna Duggar and Austin Forsyth are now married.
They can now touch each other wherever they please and even get right down to the hanky panky business of making babies.
(But can Joy-Anna wear pants like a regular human being? That answer hilariously/tragically/actually remains unknown.)
However, Joy-Anna Duggar and Austin Forsyth also star on TLC’s Counting On, a spinoff of 19 Kids and Counting that airs a new episode on Monday night.
These episodes are typically filmed months ahead of time, which raises a key question when it comes to the following clip:
Did Joy-Anna and Austin just violate a major rule of Duggar courtship?!?
The sneak peek from this evening’s installment features Joy-Anna helping Austin with one of the house-flipping projects he works on to make a living.
At one point, she’s using a saw and about to start cutting a piece of wood when… Austin most definitely grabs her hand!!!!!!
This form of risky, scandalous behavior is frowned upon by Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, whose rules for dating etiquette when it comes to their children are well-known by now.
Might the skin-touching incident have taken place after Joy-Anna and Austin got engaged? Yes, it’s possible.
But take a look at the look on Joy-Anna’s face after Austin’s hand crosses paths with hers in the following video.
It certainly doesn’t appear as if she expected that to happen, or as if it had ever happened prior to this maneuver:
Forsyth and Duggar were friends for over 15 years before they dated for a few months toward the end of 2016 and then got engaged earlier this year.
They got married in late May, sharing a number of beautiful images from their wedding online.
“We feel so happy and so excited,” the couple told People Magazine shortly after exchanging vows in a ceremony Duggar described as “surreal.”
Click through the romantic images from the reality stars’ big deal below:
Due to the VERY strict Duggar dating rules, of course, members of this controversial family are scarcely permitted to do more than whisper in one another’s ears while dating.
They cannot hold hands until they’re engaged.
(And they obviously can’t have sex until they are married… but once the rings are on those fingers, look out! Attempts at baby-making nearly always commence as soon as the couples are alone!)
In the case of Joy-Anna and Austin, they at least had a lot of time to get to know each other before any of these romantic complications even entered the picture.
“It’s really special that I got to grow up with him and my family knows him really well,” Joy-Anna said of Austin back in February, referring to their decade-and-a-half of friendship.
After getting married, Joy-Anna and Austin said farewell to their loved ones and jetted off for… somewhere.
They took a honeymoon and even shared a photo from said honeymoon, but never revealed their location.
“Thank you to all for your prayers and encouragement! We are loving married life and having the opportunity to see these beautiful places together!” Joy-Anna said in a video from from this unknown location.
Or from this previously unknown location, we should say.
In the following footage, Joy-Anna and Austin reveal their whereabouts. Check it out now!
Now that hand-holding and a whole lot more is allowed by her loved ones, when might Joy-Anna announce her pregnancy?
Does she have immediate plans to become a mother?
It sure sounds that way.
“We love kids and we’re excited to have a family,” the couple told People a few weeks back, adding:
“We’re just going to see what the Lord does. We want as many as the Lord thinks we can handle and we are putting it into his hands.”
Well, first Austin has to put something else into Joy-Anna’s somewhere else.
But we won’t get any more specific than that right now, just in case Jim Bob is reading.
