Today host Jenna Bush Hager and her husband, Henry Hager, have been happily married for 15 years, but she recently revealed the one thing he did that kept her hooked from the very beginning.
“Somebody gave Henry really good advice,” Bush Hager told her good friend and co-host Hoda Kotb on Tuesday’s (Oct. 10) episode of Today With Hoda & Jenna. “Honestly, I know the reason why we’re married. There’s many [reasons], I don’t want to downplay all of his great qualities, but one of them was he knew how to play hard to get.”
When Kotb asked for an example of her now-husband once playing “hard to get,” Bush Hager explained, “Well, he would not call everyday, yet I knew he was into me. I was like, this man knows how to play it real well.”
She also added that she was never one to wonder why he wasn’t calling her at the time, saying, “I kept it real tight, too. I know the rules.”
Luckily for them, this tactic worked quite well on her “at that stage” of her life, she says. The pair began dating around 2004 before later marrying in 2008.
Though he played hard to get “really well,” she later clarified that she never felt like he was playing “games.”
“He wasn’t being anybody but himself,” she said. “But he just would not write everyday or call everyday, he was busy. But, every once in a while, he’d have his Blackberry and he’d be like, ‘Miss you,’ ‘Thinking of you.'”
“‘Miss you’ used to be like the old ‘U up?'” Bush Hager joked.
The co-hosts also agreed that the beginning of a relationship is often “the best part.” But to Kotb, playing hard to get later on in the relationship could also be beneficial for couples: “I even think in a relationship that’s committed, sometimes it’s nice to play a little hard to get, because you’re reminded, because if everything is easy sometimes…” she said.
Bush Hager’s candid reveal comes just one day after she cracked a scandalous joke about having an affair on Today. While she and Kotb were dishing on why they find men who read so attractive, Bush Hager said if a man is “reading something I respect, that could be grounds for an affair.”
She quickly recovered and began defending her relationship after clarifying she was “just kidding.”
“I would never do that. I would never. Henry and I are very happy. And he reads,” she said.
So, he reads and he knows how to play hard to get. It’s a match made in heaven!
Today with Jenna and Hoda airs on weekdays at 10/9c on NBC.