Luke Combs proposed to girlfriend Nicole Hocking in November 2018, and while the couple shared the happy news shortly after, they hadn’t shared their full engagement story until a recent appearance on Shawn Johnson and husband Andrew East’s Couple Things podcast, released this month. “I got the story if you want to hear it,” Combs told Johnson and East before his fiancée added, “It’s not cute.”
Combs revealed that the proposal took place on the day the couple moved from an apartment in Nashville to the house they now live in farther out of the city, but it didn’t exactly go as planned. They hired a moving company to move their things, and Combs, Hocking and their two cats went to Combs’ manager’s house to spend the day while the movers were working. “The cats do not travel well,” the singer said. “Her cat peed in the crate and my cat threw up in the crate, so we spent a good part of the morning giving them baths and cleaning them.”
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“I had bought our cats new collars with our new address on them,” he continued. “She loves her cat more than anything in the world. He always sits on her lap on the couch, so I had had the ring and I was gonna put it on the cat’s collar, was the idea. When we got to the new house and everything, he was gonna jump up on her lap and everything.” Combs said that when they finally got to their new home at around 11 p.m., they found “stuff everywhere.” On the drive there, Hocking’s cat had had “a sort of panic attack,” all culminating in a situation not very conducive to a romantic proposal.
Ultimately, Combs felt that he had to propose that night because Hocking’s parents were coming the next day and they knew what he was planning, so “I pretty much just told her what I was going to do,” he said. “He was like, ‘Okay, I got these new collars with the new address on it and oh, I also got you this,” Hocking recalled. “And then he pulls [the ring] out and gets down on one knee, does the whole thing. I black out. I don’t remember this.”
“I wasn’t expecting it at all, not in the least bit,” she continued. “Especially not in that moment. Obviously I said yes, but I was just like-” “Caught you off guard,” Combs interjected. The couple is currently planning their wedding and shared that they are still aiming for their original date in 2020, though they are keeping the specific date private.
