HGTV Star Galey Alix on Sliding into Boyfriend Dale Moss's DMs Over a Year Ago: 'I D.I.Y.'ed It!' (Exclusive)

Galey Alix has found love after heartbreak — and she used her DIY skills to make it happen.

The HGTV star, who hosts the new series Home in a Heartbeat, has opened up exclusively to PEOPLE about her romance with Dale Moss, who appeared on season 16 of The Bachelorette. But while Bachelor Nation fans know her boyfriend, 34, as the guy who won Clare Crawley’s heart on the long-running reality show, Alix had no idea who he was until she happened to be listening to an old episode of the Girls Gotta Eat podcast from 2018 that featured Moss.

“I was walking the dogs, listening to the podcast … and I just remember thinking, ‘This person is so well-spoken. He is witty. He is vulnerable and shows things about his life, but without spilling all the jelly beans. He's smart.’ And I also really liked the sound of his voice,” she recalls of Moss, who, at the time the podcast was recorded, was working as a model and an entrepreneur after ending a short-lived NFL career.

So she did what any curious and resourceful single lady would do and looked him up on social media.

After a little scrolling through his photos, she was even more smitten. “I was very attracted to him physically,” she admits, revealing that she then decided to be bold and slide into his DMs. “I DIY'ed it,” she jokes. “I was like, ‘If I want this to happen, I have to do it myself.’ So I sent him a message and I just said, ‘Hey, I listened to your podcast. I love the way you think. I love the way you speak. If you're ever in South Florida, let's get lunch.’”

He responded quickly, and within days, the two were out on their first date together. “And it's been him ever since,” Alix gushes to PEOPLE, reiterating for anyone single and searching out there her advice to not be afraid to go for what you want.

“I do think it's really important that if you want something to happen in your life, you can't just sit back and expect it to happen for you. You have to make it happen, and that's kind of what I did by writing to somebody I was interested in.”

Alix’s forwardness feels particularly gutsy considering the heartache she experienced in her past. She was engaged to be married but things fell apart in 2021 when she confided in her fiancé — right before their wedding and after quitting her corporate finance job and moving to Connecticut for him — that she had been secretly struggling with an eating disorder. Instead of being the source of support and unconditional love that she needed, her would-be husband broke up with her.

"He told me he did not want to marry me anymore because I had been dishonest with him by hiding my struggle," Alix recalled to PEOPLE last week. "So that day, I moved back to Florida with my dogs, but without my fiancé, without my career, without my health, and without the home I had just worked so hard on. It was by far the lowest point of my life."

Moss also ended an engagement (he proposed to Crawley just four episodes into their Bachelorette season in 2010), so the couple was able to connect over their experiences. “I told that to him on our very first date because I was just very honest about my struggles, about an engagement ending, and then that's when he told me he had an engagement end too, but then we kind of bonded over the fact that we both had failed engagements recently,” she says.

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Asked if she’s gun-shy about getting engaged again in the future, she responds, “I definitely get anxiety thinking about the idea of marriage, and it has nothing to do with how amazing my partner is. It's more about the experience I went through the first time. So I don't know if that's in the cards for me, but I do know that I deserve to be happy and to love myself.”

For now, Alix and Moss are focused on spending as much time together as possible. He commutes back and forth to their Florida “home base” in between his various work commitments, and even puts some sweat equity into the home renovation projects for her show. 

“He has come to [nearly] every single install, and he's on top of roofs, sweating — never on camera. He's just doing it there to help me. And he's painting, and he's wallpapering in back rooms, and he's doing everything he can to help me with my dreams in the most selfless way,” she explains to PEOPLE. “So to say that I lucked out in meeting him when I did would be an understatement.”

She adds that her boyfriend is living up to a key piece of dating advice her dad gave her when she left for college: ‘He said, ‘Never listen to what a man says. Just watch what he does. Anybody can say words and tell you things to make you feel a certain way, but his actions will tell you exactly who he is and how he really thinks about you and cares about you.’”

Moss’ actions, she says, speak volumes. "The thing that has just blown me away about Dale is his actions could not be more perfectly in alignment with his words. He says, ‘I love you,' and every action he does every single day is of somebody who loves me.”

The season one finale of Home in a Heartbeat airs Wednesday, June 14 on HGTV.