Putting a ring on it? Dean Unglert has no plans to propose to his girlfriend of two years, Caelynn Miller-Keyes — but that doesn’t mean the couple won’t soon be engaged.
During the Monday, November 22, episode of his “Help! I Suck at Dating” podcast, the Bachelorette season 13 alum, 30, mentioned a conversation he had with fellow Bachelor in Paradise contestant Derek Peth and his fiancée, Saffron Vadher, about his current relationship status.
Vadher, 24, noticed Unglert was wearing a band on his ring finger and wanted to know if he and Miller-Keyes, 26, had secretly tied the knot.
“I said, ‘As far as the government’s concerned, no — but as far as our hearts are concerned, yes,'” he told listeners. “Then Caelynn leans over and she goes, ‘We’ll be engaged by 2022, trust me’ or ‘in 2022’ or something like that.”
While Miller-Keyes seemed to already be making wedding arrangements, Unglert joked that he has no plans to get down on one knee anytime soon.
“I don’t know if she’s speaking for me or if she’s saying that she’s going to propose to me,” the Colorado native explained. “I’ve made it pretty clear to her. I was like, ‘If you really want to get married, you should be the one proposing to me,’ so I think she’s got something in the works for that.”
The couple, who met in 2019 during season 6 of Bachelor in Paradise, Unglert’s second stint on the reality show, have become a Bachelor Nation success story — but it certainly wasn’t easy.
“It’s funny, I don’t think a single person thought we were going to last and even we were like, ‘No, I don’t know what’s going to happen here.’ So, we definitely defied the odds,” Miller-Keyes exclusively told Us Weekly in June.
She added, “I think that’s just our unique relationship and we really try not to listen to it. When you go on the show, so many people are going to have so many opinions about your relationship — good and bad. I think we just never really listened to those negative people and we just lived our lives.”
The pair, who bought a house in Las Vegas together in April, have forged their own path together that hasn’t hinged on marriage — or even saying “I love you.”
“She calls me Maka, but that’s, like, something that I made up and then she ran with it,” Unglert told his podcast listeners in August. “I just hate saying the L-word word, so I was like, ‘Let’s make up a different word, so we don’t have to say that to each other all the time.’”
He later clarified his comments, telling Us in September, “I do say ‘I love you’ to Caelynn, [but] I am in the camp of I’d rather show Caelynn that I love her rather than say that I love her.”
While the two once discussed getting married in Italy, the recruiter has made it clear he’s on no one else’s timetable when it comes to walking down the aisle.
Last month, the host revealed during an episode of his podcast that producers urged him to propose to Miller-Keyes when they traveled to Mexico for the season 7 finale of BiP.
“When we were down there, the producers — they, like, pulled me aside — and they’re like, ‘Hey, Dean, you should totally propose to Caelynn on the last day of the show.’ … I was like, ‘Are you serious? You’re telling me this literally the day before we were supposed to go down and film this episode,’” Unglert recalled. “The producers are not bashful when it comes to trying to encourage people to propose.”
Still, the reality TV star isn’t against the idea of settling down with Miller-Keyes. “Give us 12, 13 months and we’ll have something a little more formal on the books,” he noted during Monday’s episode.
