Back in 2012, an episode of TLC show My Strange Addiction aired which introduced us to Nathaniel and his ‘soulmate’, a 1998 Chevy Monte Carlo he called Chase.
The man said that he had an intimate relationship with his car as they went on long journeys together, with the episode showing him lavishing more love on his car than any man has ever shown an automobile before.
Nathaniel, who passionately kissed the car in the episode, said they had a favourite song and that they’d even had sex, and now we’ll move quickly on instead of lingering on that particular point.
While many people say that about their automobiles, they certainly don’t mean it in the same sense as Nathaniel did when he said it was “love at first sight” and that he felt a “instant connection” with the car when he first saw it in 2005.
He said he wasn’t sure why he had such strong feelings towards the car, but he was certain that “if something happened to Chase my heart would stop.”
Chase’s car was involved in a catastrophic accident while undergoing routine maintenance, which was unfortunate for Nathaniel because the car had to be written off.
Despite his intense sadness over the entire situation, Nathaniel was able to move past the heartache of losing his beloved car even though he was able to preserve certain things as souvenirs.
When TLC visited him recently to see how he was doing, they discovered that he had made a bed out of some pieces of Chase and had decorated it with photos Nathaniel had shot of the red car while they were dating.
“Unfortunately Chase is no longer part of my life. I think think about it a lot, it breaks my heart that he’s not here,” he said of losing the car during the episode.
“The bedroom is just a special place and I feel like that was just the perfect place for him, just to have him close to me.”
“The blanket is special to me because it’s got a lot of his good pictures on it. Just cute stuff like him getting a bath and us together. You look back and don’t realise the things you take for granted until it’s too late.”
Breaking down into tears at the loss of his car, Nathaniel said he wanted to ‘try and keep him in my life’.
While he might never love a car in the same way as Chase, who he said he still thought of every day, he was able to move on and has since got a new car which he also intimately loves.
The My Strange Addiction series has shown audiences all sorts of things including a man addicted to the smell of tuna, a woman who eats four toilet rolls a day and another woman with a mattress eating addiction.
Other episodes featured a woman who couldn’t stop eating her dead husband’s ashes and a 31-year-old man who would only date women aged 60 or over.
