Jenna Bush Hager Reveals She Proposed to Her Husband After 3 Months of Dating and ‘Several Cocktails’

Jenna Bush Hager never shied away from sharing her plans for the future with her now-husband Henry Hager – especially not after “several cocktails.” During Monday’s Today with Hoda & Jenna, the 41-year-old daughter of former President George W. Bush and Laura Bush revealed how she actually popped the question to Hager several years before the two actually got engaged in 2007.

“I proposed to Henry after several cocktails,” she told E! News presenter Justin Sylvester, who was filling in for Jenna’s usual co-host, Hoda Kotb. “I was 22 years old, my sister was standing with us, we were dancing and Barbara just started shuffling backwards. She was like, ‘What is happening here?’ We’d only been dating three months. He told me he loved me and I’m like, ‘Me too! Let’s get married!’”

Henry didn’t accept Jenna’s proposal at the time, responding, “just like, ‘Uh uh uh,’” but did pop the question three years later when she was 25. It was then that reality started to set in for the first daughter. “Then we got engaged, and my parents put out a statement because my dad was president,” recalled Jenna, who now shares daughters Mila, 10, Poppy, 7, and son Hal, 4, with her husband. “We were sitting in the airport and it came on CNN that we were engaged and I was like, ‘Woah, woah, woah, what?’ …I mean, I’m happy – I married him, I have three kids, I adore him – but I was like, ‘What? What happens if for some reason…you know?’ It felt like so much pressure for both of us.”

Before Henry popped the question officially, Jenna admitted in February on Today with Hoda & Jenna
that she gave him an ultimatum to propose to her or she would move to Latin America. “When we were dating, I was leaving Washington, D.C., and I kind of – in a dramatic fashion you may or may not recognize – said, ‘If you don’t want me to leave for Latin America, we need to get engaged,’” she admitted. “It was kind of like a manipulative ultimatum. Real manipulative. And [I said], ‘You know, there are very handsome men over there, but could we get engaged?’”