Jenna Bush Hager Reveals How She Knew Her Now-Husband Henry Was the One

How you know someone is "the one" is no easy thing to answer. Perhaps it's worth invoking the Ernest Hemingway Law from his 1926 book The Sun Also Rises and applying it to romance: "'How did you go bankrupt?' Bill asked. 'Two ways,' Mike said. 'Gradually and then suddenly.'" Or maybe, for some, it's easy to pinpoint the exact moment. For others, it's simply more of a gut feeling that trebles into your limbs, permeates your brain, and then slides into this beautiful humdrum we call partnership, we call life.

Now, in a recent TODAY with Hoda & Jenna clip, Jenna Bush Hager opens up to Hoda Kotb about what made her feel certain her now-husband Henry Hager was her forever. "I do think one of the reasons why I knew really soon that Henry was the one, was that I was completely myself and he loved it," says Bush Hager, who celebrated her 12th wedding annviersary with Henry this May. Noting that this kind of authenticity in relationships wasn't always the case for her, Bush Hager admits that in high school she told her boyfriend she loved skiing despite never having hit the powder a day in her life.

Kotb even confesses that this habit of not embracing your true self in relationships persisted even into the early stages of her relationship with her current fiancé, Joel Schiffman. "I feel like I was [not completely being my real self in relationships for a] long time. Even with Joel. It was like 'no, great, I love carrots, just a few! I'm so full!' I was starving, I would go home and eat," shares Kotb. "Now, he looks at me, like, we had ribs the other days, he was like 'Wow! you really like those!" I go 'Do we have another rack? Is that it? That's all we got?'" she jokes about the present-day reality of the Kotb-Schiffman household.

WATCH: Jenna Bush Hager Celebrates Her Family's Steady Force—Former First Lady Laura Bush

Needless to say, we're glad both Kotb and Bush Hager found their forevermores, even if it took some fabricated skiing skills and feigning dinnertime fullness to get there. Alas, it takes self-growth and roundabout paths to find your soulmate—if only we knew that when we were spinning slope-side yarns in high school.