After announcing his engagement to Jessica Clarke over the weekend, Ben Higgins is giving us all the details from his intimate proposal.
During today’s episode of his Almost Famous podcast with Ashley Iaconetti, Higgins spilled all the tea about how he proposed to his girlfriend.
“We had stopped all intentional conversations about our future back in December because I wanted her to be so shocked for this proposal,” he shared. “So many longer that we were going to drag this on was just going to get harder and harder on this woman that I loved […] I had the ring and once you have the ring, it’s like impossible to not want to propose.”
When announcing their engagement on Instagram, Clarke shared the moment that Higgins got down on one knee. She wrote, “I don’t remember everything you said, but I know that I said yes. I woke up in a dream today and I get to live in this dream every day from now on.”
On the podcast, the former Bachelor star also shared that while the two lovebirds left to Nashville, Tennessee to self-isolate, he spoke to both Clarke’s parents and decided to propose to her there.
“It would be just as special, if not more special, to do it here at her [parent’s house],” he said. “Her brother, who is a great chef, was going to cook the dinner and we would do it in the backyard and we could surprise her with her favorite flowers, sun flowers, at the pond that she grew up on and I would take her on a walk down the pond to propose to her there.”
He went on, “We walk out the door, we’re walking down the road and I have the ring in my back pocket and I’m trying at that point to think about what kind of small talk I’m going to make and I get so awkward because Jessica’s my best friend, I love this girl and for whatever reason, I became a middle school boy talking to his school crush when I was on this like, ten second walk. I didn’t know what to say to her!”
And in that moment, Clarke didn’t know she was getting proposed to either. According to Higgins, Clarke didn’t think “she was getting proposed to” especially given the circumstances surrounding the coronavirus outbreak. “She thought that we would have to do push back our proposal for months which made her really sad,” he shared.
Higgins then continued to gush about the moment he popped the question. “[I told her], Jessica you are the kindest, you are the most loving, you are the most supportive person I have ever met. You have loved me well, you have loved me in crazy circumstances and you’ve loved me in really great circumstances,” he recalled. “And then I just got down on one knee and pulled out the ring and she at that point didn’t know what was happening because her face was shocked!”
He added, “Her mouth was wide open. She doesn’t even say ‘yes’ when I ask her to marry me, she just shakes her head up and down and that’s it. And I go, ‘is that a yes?’ And she’s like, ‘uh yeah!'”
During the episode, the former Bachelor also opened up about their future plans leading up to their wedding.
For starters, the 31-year-old shared that the two won’t move in together before they’re married. “That is a choice we’ve talked about and we’ve gone back and forth on it,” he explained. “For a couple reasons we won’t. One is a lot of it is respect for my family and her family as well as lessons we’ve learned from past relationships.”
He added, “Jessica and I, we’ve abstained and tried to do this the best we can to make our relationship as healthy as possible and there are steps that we will take to do that and so that’s why right now we will not be living together before we’re married but I think we’ll be finding a house before then that we can both start to make our own.”
The news of the couple’s engagement comes more than two years after he and Lauren Bushnell broke up after being engaged for a year. Higgins and Clarke made their relationship Instagram official in February 2019.