Hoda Kotb Is Engaged to Boyfriend Joel Schiffman After 6 Years of Dating — Hear the Proposal Story!

Congratulations are in order for Hoda Kotb! During the Monday, November 25, episode of Today, Hoda, 55, announced that she and her longtime boyfriend Joel Schiffman are engaged.

“I have to tell you something that a friend of mine, a friend of ours, asked me to let you guys in on a secret,” the mom of two gushed. “I’ll give you her initials. Her initials are Hoda Kotb and she’s engaged.”

“My heart has literally been pounding,” she said.

After slipping on her engagement ring during the middle of the show, Hoda explained how Joel proposed to her over the weekend when they were on vacation. “We ended up having a little dinner on the beach … and he was like, ‘I have something else I would like to say,’ and he said some beautiful things and then he got down on one knee,” she gushed. “Then he said, ‘Would you be my wife?”’

“I was totally shocked,” Hoda added. “He had a good poker face.”

Hoda and Joel share their 2-year-old daughter, Haley, and their newborn daughter, Hope, together. Now that she’s engaged, the next thing on Hoda’s mind is how she’s going to break the news to their kids.

“How am I going to explain [to the girls] your parents are going to get married?” the I Really Needed This Today: Words to Live By author joked to her cohosts on the show. “We’re still trying to figure out that part.”

Hoda and Joel, a finance guy, first met at a book signing event in the summer of 2013 — and it’s been history ever since.

https://www.instagram.com/p/ByU4H4FFMjz/

“He was the first person to say ‘I love you,’ and I remember him saying it to me,” Hoda previously recalled on Today. “And after he said it, I remember just sitting there because I wanted to feel it for a minute.

“Like, just to sit with that for a minute — somebody saying, you know, he just said, ‘I love you,'” she continued. “And I paused, and he goes, ‘Don’t leave me hanging out here in the abyss.”’

After the couple made their feelings known for each other, Hoda later told Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live! there was nobody else in the world for her but Joel. “I’m going to be with Joel until my last breath,” the TV host said.

While there’s no date set yet, we can hear the wedding bells already!