Jenna Bush Hager may have gone “too far” when it came to her joke about having an affair. On Monday’s Today With Hoda & Jenna, Bush Hager clarified her devotion to husband Henry Hager after admitting she gets “dehydrated” when watching a man take out a book and read. The conversation arose as Bush Hager and her co-host Hoda Kotb discussed an article titled “The Thirstiest Thing a Man Can Do Is Read.”
“It’s hot,” Kotb agreed, asking her co-host what she thinks when seeing a man on a bench reading in Central Park. “If they have little eyeglasses too, just sitting reading, and if they’re reading something I respect? I mean that could be a means for an affair,” Bush Hager joked, adding, “I’m just kidding, I would never do that. I would never, Henry and I are very happy. And he reads.” When Kotb asked why the mother of three was getting so defensive, Bush Hager replied that she “shouldn’t have said that,” adding, “I went too far.”
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Bush Hager and Hager first met in 2004 when he was working on the re-election campaign for her father, former President George W. Bush. The two would go on to marry in 2008, welcoming their first child, daughter Mila, in April 2013. In August 2015, daughter Poppy was born and in August 2019, son Hal joined the family.
Bush Hager has opened up about the early days of her relationship in the past, sharing in August that she actually proposed to her husband “after several cocktails” when she was 22 years old and they had been dating for just three months. “We’d only been dating three months. He told me he loved me and I’m like, ‘Me too! Let’s get married!’” she recalled. While Hager didn’t accept his future wife’s proposal at the time, he did pop the question three years later – that is after the NBC anchor issued an ultimatum.
“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 in February on Today. “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?’”
