Cecily Strong, like many of us, knew her fiancé was going to propose ahead of time

By CNN Newsource

Published March 28, 2024 5:05 PM

By Alli Rosenbloom, CNN

(CNN) — “Saturday Night Live” alum Cecily Strong recently revealed that she’s engaged… and it wasn’t exactly a surprise for her.

Referring to herself as “kind of a detective,” the actor and comedian broke down how things played out when her partner – known only as “Jack” – was planning his proposal, while she was a guest on Wednesday’s episode of “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”

“We talked about getting married and then one day he was like, ‘I’m so inundated with emails and texts, look at this,’” Strong said.

When Strong looked at what Jack was showing her on his phone, she said, a text from a friend popped up that read, “How did it go?” The giveaway: the text was punctuated with a ring emoji.

“And then I was like, oh… oh no,” she said, laughing.

With Jack’s plan out in the open, Strong said she told her now-fiancé that the surprise would be when he chose to pop the question.

“And then I had kind of a rough night in December and I was like, ‘Can I just wear the damn ring now?’ And so, that’s how we got engaged,” Strong said.

In truth, most of us now-married people knew the “big question” wasn’t exactly if our partners would pop it, but rather when (this CNN writer included).

While Strong has stayed mostly private about her relationship with Jack, she wrote in a 2021 essay for Vulture that she met him at a Christmas party and they began their relationship while she was grieving the death of her cousin Owen.

“At first I thought it was so difficult to meet someone right as I was losing someone I loved so much,” she wrote at the time. “But grieving for Owen was like nothing I’d ever experienced, and I promised Owen and myself to continue to let all that love be there along with the sadness.”

Ultimately, Strong wrote, she told Jack the night they made their relationship official that she felt he was “a gift” from her late cousin.

“And I like thinking of it that way.”