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Michelle Young found her forever love outside of The Bachelorette, and she is engaged to her boyfriend, Jack Leius.
“I completely froze when I saw Jack standing in the middle of this beautiful flower arch of white roses,” Young told People on Tuesday, December 3, revealing that Leius worked with her management team to stage a fake commercial shoot to surprise Young. “I was fooled so badly that for a moment I thought the joke was that Jack was one of the male models that I would be working with at the shoot.”
He proposed with a 3.56-carat emerald-cut diamond.
“I tried to say yes several times but was in shock that no words really came out,” she gushed. “There were a lot of happy tears and of course I said YES!”
Young first hinted at her relationship with Leius in October 2023 when she posted an Instagram Story photo of him kissing her cheek, though his face was obscured by a baseball cap. Later that month, she hard-launched the romance, captioning loved-up Instagram pictures of the two, “Hit the Jackpot with you.”
Young and Leius made their official public debut at Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist’s televised wedding in January, the same month they revealed they had moved in together.
Shortly after their appearance at the nuptials, the pair explained how they met and began dating.
“She has a good friend and her friend has a little brother, who I know, and her friend’s little brother posted Michelle in his [Instagram] Story, and so I kinda just hit him up a couple times,” Leius detailed on the “Almost Famous” podcast in January. “Like, ‘Hey, man, when are you gonna introduce me to Michelle?’”
Leius emphasized that he was “really serious” about landing an introduction because he thought Young seemed “really cool” and “beautiful.”
Young, meanwhile, had noticed Leius too and mentioned her interest to their mutual friends.
“I had no idea any of this was going on, [and] I was with said little brother and my friend, and we were just talking,” she recalled. “I said, ‘I have no idea how I’m supposed to meet my person in Minnesota. Like, [he] is definitely not in Minnesota at this point. I gotta start traveling more because they’re not on the apps!’”
Once Young saw Leius’ Instagram profile, she felt an instant attraction. “I was like, ‘Well, is he a good person?’” she remembered asking her friends. “In my world, I thought I brought it up to this person, but [Jack] also did within, like, 48 hours. … It was really weird.”
Later that night, the duo met for the first time and immediately hit it off. “I think we spent the next four days together,” he said. “And we were dating by Sunday.”
Young felt that their connection was meant to be, thanks to a series of invisible strings they later recognized.
“We went through breakups at the exact same time,” she noted. “We were going through devastating breakups [and] we were in the same stage of our breakups as we were going through ‘Not ready to meet someone’ [to] ‘Ready to meet somebody’ and then those few steps back. We go to all the same bars … the lake he grew up on, my family fishes [there] 24/7.”
Young first appeared on season 25 of The Bachelor in 2021, where she became Matt James’ runner-up. She went on to star on season 18 of The Bachelorette later that year. Although she got engaged to Nayte Olukoya on the show, they announced their split in June 2022.
