Throwing her off! Ben Higgins was determined to surprise fiancée Jessica Clarke before popping the question — and did everything he could to make sure of that.
“I spoke to her father in December and since then, I was like, ‘OK, I want to make this a surprise so I’m gonna not talk about any future pieces of our relationship for as long as it takes until I propose so that she can be a little shocked,'” the Bachelor: Winter Games alum, 31, told Chris Harrison during his Instagram Live on Tuesday, March 31. “She was really confused at any time we talked about our future, I would change the subject.”
However, the secret made the couple even stronger. “I would say there’s, like, a confidence and a peace now with our relationship that did not exist five days before,” he added.
Us Weekly broke the news that the former Bachelor proposed to Clarke, 24, in Tennessee on Saturday, March 28. The couple started dating in 2018 after he messaged her via Instagram, and while he knew he wanted to propose for a while, this wasn’t his original plan.
“I had these big plans for New York City and we had planned some incredible things. The dancers from The Bachelor – Live On Stage had planned a dance routine, we had picked the perfect place, our families were gonna fly out and meet us,” Higgins explained. “Well, that all changed, and it actually has been awesome because right now we’re in the same house, we’ve been here for weeks with her family, her brothers [and] her sister-in-law. So, we just did it at the pond behind the house and it was still nice. It wasn’t as glamorous, but it was so much more special, I think.”
The model agreed, noting that the at-home proposal was extremely special and romantic.
“Even today, I was going on a walk around the neighborhood and I walked out my driveway and Ben took my hand,” she said. “He walked me to the place where he proposed and that’s something that’s really cool because my heart still got the same butterflies it did the first time he walked me there a couple of days ago. So we’ll always have that and you can’t just go to New York every day.”
