Reba McEntire wants to make it clear that she hasn’t gone down the aisle just yet!
The 70-year-old country music star appeared on the Today show on Monday, Dec. 1 to talk about her various projects, including season 2 of her sitcom, Happy’s Place. McEntire costars on the series alongside her real-life fiancé, Rex Linn.
During the interview, co-anchor Savannah Guthrie noted, “You also met your husband there. So Rex, good ole Rex…”
McEntire quickly jumped in to correct Guthrie’s word choice. “Now, wait a minute. Before everybody has a conniption fit at home, we’re just engaged,” she said.
Guthrie, 53, apologized for her incorrect wording, and McEntire said she had to explain more for her own sake. “My family will go, ‘Wait, you didn’t tell us?!’ ” the singer said.
Linn, 69, happened to be in the studio for the interview, and when the camera cut to him, he initially looked confused by the mistake before grinning as his bride-to-be discussed their dynamic.
McEntire added that working alongside her fiancé is a “blast.”
“He is a workaholic, and he loves to rehearse,” the Voice coach said of her man. “Me, not so much on the rehearsal part, so he really makes sure that I know my lines, that I’m ready to go when we have a tape day. We have a blast. We’re so grateful and thankful that we get to go to work together, work together, and then go home together.”
She added that filming season 2 of the NBC sitcom has been even better than the first season.
“Season 2’s so much fun!” she shared. “You know in season 1 you kind of get the meshing together and learning each other’s habits and how they want to work. And it was fun. Season 2 is so much more fun now we know each other.”
McEntire confirmed on the 3rd Hour that she and Linn got engaged in December 2024. “Almost a year in December,” she said of the engagement.
She added, “A lot of people did not know. And when he asked me to marry him, it was Christmas Eve a year ago. So we were gonna announce it when we got back to L.A., but the fires happened. And there was not room for our joy in devastating situation that everybody else was in.”
McEntire said that they decided to wait to share the news — but when a reporter asked about her “fiancé” at the Emmys, she “didn’t correct her” because it “sounded good to me.”
When it comes to planning a wedding, don’t expect the country music superstar to have an over-the-top celebration. “A Reba, Rex wedding is going to be very different,” the singer shared. “It’s going to be low-key, lots of fun, lots of people, lots of food. Our big motto is just have fun.”
PEOPLE confirmed McEntire and Linn’s engagement back in September, five years into their romance. “It happened a few months ago and they are very happy,” a source previously told PEOPLE of their engagement.
Despite knowing one another since the 90s, the couple didn’t reconnect until 2020 after the death of McEntire’s mother.
“In 2020, when Mama got sick, he called me,” McEntire recalled on Today in October 2021. “We’d gotten to see each other before because we’re both on Young Sheldon. So starting in March of 2020, we just kept talking and visiting and finally got together, see each other in June.”
“And we’ve been pretty much inseparable ever since,” she continued.
