Source: Derrick Salters/WENN.com / WENN
As previously shared, Jeannie Mai and rapper Jeezy announced their engagement earlier this month after he proposed to the TV co-host on March 27. Since then, he’s gushed over them getting to be together until “Infinity,” and they’ve slow-danced together in quarantine for fans. But now we’re finally getting to hear from Jeannie, who talked about her big engagement news on The Real on Monday. The ladies hosted the show for the first time in weeks from their respective homes, dressed as up or down as they wanted. Jeannie, in a sports bra and wet hair, was asked by Adrienne Houghton how she saw herself going about prepping for marriage differently a second time. She was previously married to ex-husband Freddy Harteis for 10 years. The question made the future Mrs. Jay Jenkins emotional, noting that caring for herself after divorce helped her get to a place where she could fall in love with someone else again.
“I would say that that personal time, for anyone that’s been divorced, you guys if you have friends who’ve been divorced, it is one of the most traumatic things that can happen,” she said as she teared up. “You feel like you failed. You feel embarrassed for all the people that were there at your wedding. Then you get jaded! I remember telling you guys, I think I said I’m not getting married again. And I’m sure if you go back in episodes you’ll see times I made jokes about marriage. The thing I think that saved me is that I never gave up on love. I never gave up on love because it’s so omnipresent. It’s so healing that the only reason I recognize healthy love with Jay today is because I took that time to love myself.”
The 41-year-old admitted that the process of loving on herself after being married for so long wasn’t easy. She was very shaken by her divorce proceedings and the pain that lingered from the split.
“Two years I took away from divorce, and the divorce hurt,” she said. “People change. People behave in ways you didn’t expect and you see things in people and then it makes you completely not able to trust anybody after that. You see the partner you slept with and shared a life with a certain way, and then things change, again, because of hurt feelings, not because people are bad people but because it’s just hurt.”
Jeannie and Jeezy have been an item since 2018.
