Wedding bells are ringing for Today host Hoda Kotb and her longtime boyfriend Joel Schiffman. The pair just got engaged, and the proposal story will give you all the feels!
Kotb shared the beautiful news on live television (Nov. 25). The announcement had not even been shared with her co-anchors yet.
“You guys, I have to tell you something,” she says. “A friend of mine, and ours, asked me to let you guys in on a secret. I’ll give you her initials: Hoda Kotb, and she’s engaged.”
Kotb then flashes her gorgeous engagement ring towards the camera as her fellow hosts jump for joy and embrace her with hugs.
Kotb explains the proposal, which went down during one of the couple’s regular getaways. “We went on our usual vacation. We ended up having a little dinner on the beach. We were done with the dinner. I was eating my churros licking the bottom of the bowl. He was like, ‘I have something else I’d to say.’ He said some beautiful things, got down on one knee and he said, ‘would you be my wife?'”
Kotb added that they hadn’t yet shared the news to her daughters Haley Joy, 2, and Hope Catherine 1. “We’re still trying to figure out that part of how exactly to explain that to them,” she admitted.
Kotb and Schiffman have been dating for six years. “It’s one of the most natural relationships I’ve ever been in,” she once told People. “I’m so happy, I really am. But you know sometimes you hate to jinx something. I’m like, ‘don’t jinx it.’
She continued: “He’s a guy that gives me butterflies again at 50-years-old.”
Back in 2017, Kotb opened up about her choice to adopt after a battle with breast cancer left her unable to conceive naturally. She says Schiffman was on board from the very beginning.
“I was afraid to even say it out loud, because then it felt so real,” Kotb recalls. “I said, ‘Think about it for a day or a week or whatever.’ And he said, ‘I don’t need a day. Let’s get this journey going.’ At that point, I blubbered like a baby. It was like the dam burst.”
Congratulations to the happy couple!