Nina Dobrev and Shaun White are engaged after nearly 5 years together: Inside the romantic, flower-filled proposal
Nina Dobrev and Shaun White are engaged!
The “Vampire Diaries” star and the Olympic snowboarder shared photos from the stunning proposal to their respective Instagram pages Wednesday.
“She said YES 💍♾️,” White wrote.
Dobrev, 35, also expressed her excitement by posting, “RIP boyfriend, hello fiancé 💍♾️.”
White, 38, popped the question to Dobrev earlier this month, the couple told Vogue in an interview also published Wednesday.
He tricked her into thinking that she had been invited to an intimate Vogue/CFDA dinner with Anna Wintour at the Golden Swan in New York City, but when she walked up the stairs, she saw him standing underneath a white floral arch with rose petals and candles placed throughout the room.
“I went into shock. I just froze and stared at him,” she told the magazine, recalling that she kept repeating, “No!”
Dobrev eventually managed to say yes, and White slipped a five-carat Lorraine Schwartz ring onto her finger.
The “Originals” actress admitted that she blacked out during the proposal itself, but she still knew that “he said all the right things.”
The couple’s friends eventually met them at the restaurant, and they celebrated their engagement until 1 a.m.
“Eventually we realized — other than the caviar — we hadn’t eaten anything. So we ordered Shake Shack and dumplings to the Golden Swan,” she recalled.
White told the outlet that he had actually been planning to propose to his longtime girlfriend for months — first during their summer trip and then on their vacation in Cape Town, South Africa — but the plans got foiled for various reasons.
It first was revealed that the couple were dating in April 2020, but they met in late 2019 at an event for motivational speaker Tony Robbins in Florida, where they were both giving presentations.
“I actually didn’t know anything about her,” White said of the “Degrassi” star, who agreed to have dinner with him afterward.
White told People that his ego took a bruising when staff at the restaurant were more excited to see her than him.
“The place was packed … and she was like, ‘Let me go see if I can get a table,'” he explained.
Thinking she told the hostess, “There’s an old gold medalist over there who wants a table,” it was Dobrev who was then asked for a photo by one of the servers, as White recalled: “I was like, ‘What’s happening? What’s going on?’ It was actually really funny.”
Dobrev made their relationship Instagram-official in May 2020 when she shared a photo of herself holding a pair of scissors while the snowboarding champ jokingly looked afraid.
White later uploaded a video of Dobrev changing up his look, which he captioned, “My hairstylist said he wouldn’t, so she did. #QuarantineCuts.”
White has since said he can’t wait to have kids, telling Us Weekly in January 2022, “I would love to be a dad.
“It’s just something that seems so exciting, you know? I love being around people, and I love the idea of having someone other than my own pursuits to look after.”
He added, “For a guy like myself that’s really poured his everything into one aspect of life, which is competing in snowboarding, I feel like over the years, I’ve gathered a more well-rounded life with other things going on. Something like that just seems like an amazing turning of the page, a new chapter. … I wanna take this on.”
Dobrev previously dated her “Vampire Diaries” co-star Ian Somerhalder from 2011 to 2013 and “Bridge of Spies” actor Austin Stowell from 2015 to 2016. She was also linked to former “Scream Queens” star Glen Powell in 2017.
White dated rock singer Sarah Barthel from 2014 to 2019.
