When Luke Combs and his fiancé Nicole Hocking called into the Couple Things podcast recently, they shared so many things we didn’t know we didn’t know.
The podcast is hosted by Olympian Shawn Johnson and her husband NFL player Andrew East, and they have a way of getting their guests to open up about things they’ve never really shared before. Such as:
Hoking studied civil engineering in college.
When she first moved to Nashville, she worked at BMI during the week and was a bartender on the weekends.
They’d only been dating for about three or four months when Combs wrote “Beautiful Crazy” for Hoking. (Her favorite part of the song is near the end, when he sings “she’s crazy” three times.)
What she loves most about Combs is how thoughtful and caring he is.
What Combs’ loves most about Hoking is that she doesn’t take any shit from anybody.
Combs says his pet peeve is that she gets mad at him for nothing.
Hoking’s is that he leaves dirty shirts in a room she just cleaned.
Their chickens have been escaping.
They do not have UberEats or PostMates out where they live.
But when the talked turned serious, Hoking revealed how the two first started dating. “We kind of moved to Nashville around the same time as each other. And Nashville was different five years ago. Everyone kind of knew each other. Now it’s turned into a bachelorette town. Then we were down in Florida for a songwriter’s festival — and we were both single — and I was leaving a songwriters’ round and he was walking up late to it. By himself. I was like, ’Come hang out with us,’” she recalled. Combs added, “I looked bad, too. I was wearing $5 camo gym shorts from Walmart. Classy stuff. And the oldest t-shirt that I owned. I didn’t have anything going on when we met. I didn’t have a record deal, or a publishing deal or anything.”
But fast forward to the Big Day of his proposal. For the first time, Combs decided to tell the entire story, even though Hoking said, “It’s not cute.” So prepare yourself for what may be the most so-unromantic-that-it’s-romantic story.
“It was the day we were moving from our apartment in Nashville to this house that we bought. That was in November 2018. And we couldn’t move in on the day of the closing, so in the meantime we went to my manager’s house to spend the day there while the movers were moving all the stuff.
“But we had to bring the cats with us, and they do not travel well,” he said of the mess the two cats made in their crates. “We spent a good part of the morning cleaning them, and they’re stressed out. But I had bought the cats new collars with our new address on them, and I had the ring and I was gonna put it on her cat’s collar. So we get back to the house at 11:00 pm. There’s stuff everywhere, the beds are piled up with clothes. And when we were halfway there, her cat pees on himself. He was hyperventilating and then she couldn’t get him out of the crate. She doesn’t know why I’m getting upset and she’s getting mad at me. By the way, her parents are flying in the next morning, and they knew. So I had to ask her. So I told her what I was gonna do.”
“He was like, ’I got new collars for the cats, and oh I also got you this.’ He pulls (the ring) out, gets down on one knee. My ears are hot. I wasn’t expecting it, especially not in that moment,” she said.
me still planning our wedding: pic.twitter.com/czKOsU9Iit
— NICOLE HOCKING ✨ (@nicohocking) May 6, 2020
Combs and Hoking are still planning to get married on the original date they set for 2020, but he hasn’t officially shared that specific date with the world.
