Years before Henry Hager popped the question to Jenna Bush Hager, she beat him to the punch.
Jenna revealed on TODAY with Hoda & Jenna Friday that she was the one who first asked her husband to marry her when they had only been dating for three months.
"I asked Henry to marry me,'' she said.
"How did I not know that?" Hoda asked.
"Because he said no, and then he asked me five years later,'' Jenna said.
Even though Jenna was still in her early 20s, she figured that she knew they were going to be together, so why wait?
"After three months of dating — I might've had a Christmas cocktail — and we were dancing, and I said, 'This is it, I know it, let's just get married, what are we waiting for?'" Jenna said.
"He smiled, and he was like, 'I'm crazy about you, but you're young.'"
The two eventually got engaged in 2007 and married in 2008 when Jenna was 26. They are now the parents of three children.
Jenna was prompted to remember her break with tradition of asking Henry to marry her by a recent conversation Oprah Winfrey had with actress Tracee Ellis Ross.
The 47-year-old spoke about being single by choice during the Dallas stop on Winfrey's 2020 Vision Tour last week.
"I, like many of us, was taught to grow up dreaming of my wedding, not of my life, and I spent many years dreaming of my wedding and also waiting to be chosen,'' she said. "Well, here's the thing, I'm the chooser."
That sense of empowerment reminded Jenna of how she didn't sit back and wait for Henry to choose her.
"It doesn't only have to do with romantic partners,'' she said. "We have agency over our lives."
Hoda added that an increased sense of agency can often come with age.
"I do think the older I've gotten, the more I've realized I can ask for it, and also decisions are easier now in life than they used to be,'' she said. "Because when you have children, then all of a sudden decisions are clear. ... I feel like the world clears itself out."
