Gwen Stefani Shares the Story of How Blake Shelton Proposed

Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton announced their engagement in October after five years of dating, and Stefani has now shared the story behind the proposal, which happened at Shelton's Oklahoma ranch. During an appearance on The Kelly Clarkson Show, Stefani revealed that she "had no idea" and was actually trying to get out of the trip back to Oklahoma.

"It was getting too complicated with COVID and the family and I'm like, 'I think we should just cancel the trip,'" she recalled. "It was one of those. And then we got it all together, we ended up going." The No Doubt singer shared that Shelton's sister and her family were in attendance, as were Stefani's brother and his family as well as Stefani's three sons. She explained that she and Shelton are building a house in Oklahoma and had planned to go "from the one part of the land to the other part of the land to go see the house."

"Meanwhile, I guess Blake had had this ring ready to go for a couple weeks and nobody knew," she said, excluding her father, Dennis, from that group after sharing that Shelton had spoken with him about the engagement at Stefani's birthday party in early October.

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Returning to the day of the proposal, Stefani noted that her family wasn't making things easy for Shelton. "Everybody was like, 'No, we gotta get back, we're cooking a hobo stew on the fire and we can't let it burn' and my son was like, 'No, I gotta go to the bathroom, I don't want to go!' It was all these things happening and I walked in and my son was sitting by this fireplace and Blake basically was getting down on his knees to do a fire and he goes, 'Hey, can you look in that cabinet over there and get me a firestarter?'"

"So I opened the cabinet and there was a ring in a box and I was like, 'Ahh! What? Are you serious?'" she continued. "So everybody came running around because I guess they heard us screaming or whatever, and crying. There was no video, my sister-in-law to be was just shooting pictures and that's that photo that we put out. It was a pretty magical moment."

Before the proposal, Shelton shared on The Bobby Bones Show that he had been keeping Stefani's ring in a less-than-secure spot. "To be honest with you — and this is scary — the scariest thing was I had that ring in the compartment on my door of my truck for about a week, and I don't know about you, but stuff falls out of that damn thing on my truck all the time," he said. "I'm digging in there looking for a flashlight or change and I kept thinking, 'Man, somebody's gonna hit the jackpot whenever I drop this thing out of my truck.' I wanted to keep it there all the time because I didn't know when I would have the exact right moment. But thank God I didn't lose the ring."