How Whitney Way Thore Found Her Forever in Fiancé Jake Beaudoin

As for the proposal, overlooking the Blue Ridge Parkway, the 42-year-old was so surprised, she joked, “I was wearing pigtails and a bandana.” 

Of course, Thore is fully ready to tie the knot with Beaudoin, having endured her share of relationships that were on the for worse end of the spectrum. 

Take her first engagement to Chase Severino. Not seven months after he slid a yellow sparkler onto the fourth finger of her left hand in October 2019, she discovered that he was expecting a baby with another woman. 

“I thought, ‘Lord, I will never date anyone ever again for the rest of my life,'” Thore recounted to E! News a year later. “It was amazing how quickly I was able to heal from all that.”

Because by that point, she had said “oui” to an unidentified French graphic designer she’d met online, sharing that things “went pretty quickly from tutor to suitor” once she divulged her crush.

But after she discovered they weren’t speaking the same language—”The major issue with the French man was that he does not want a public life,” the reality star explained to Us Weekly—she returned to the drawing board.

With the one-two punch of potential fertility issues stemming from her polycystic ovarian syndrome (“I wasn’t taking precautions really ever and I never accidentally got pregnant,” she told E!, “I feel like that’s not the best sign”) and her hesitations about single parenting, she’d accepted the idea that she might be dancing solo indefinitely.

“I’m thinking if I can’t meet the right man, or even a man, what are the chances that I’m ready to have a baby in two or three years?” she reasoned to E! in 2024. “It’s scary. It really is. And I am just trying to assume it won’t happen, so that I can come to terms with that. And then if it does, that’ll be a nice surprise.”

But while she had some qualms about , “I had such a wonderful childhood,” she reasoned, “and I just think of all the ways that I want to replicate that.” 

And she knew the right guy wouldn’t be turned off by some vials in her freezer.

“I definitely wouldn’t say it immediately, because I already have a hard enough time getting dates,” she joked to E!. But if several dates in she found herself thinking, “like, ‘Oh, I might have a future with this person, that’s probably the kind of thing I would talk about then.”

After all, she predicted, “The journey is far from over. And I’m very excited about the future.” 

As she enters her bridal era, check out more stars who recently said yes to forever.