After a courtship of three years, Jake Owen is finally engaged to his girlfreind, Erica Hartlein.
Owen shared the news on his Instagram on Monday night (Nov. 30). A photo of the artist, Hartlein and daughter Paris shows the couple with smiles on their faces and Hartlein wearing a large, sparkling diamond ring.
The couple have known each other since 2017, and appeared for the first time in public together at the 2018 ACM Awards. They met when Hartlein was working as an interior designer at Restoration Hardware and Owen was browsing the store.
“I was just intrigued by how beautiful she was and how she was holding court in that store that day and telling people what they needed to do. I was like ‘Wow, she’s got a lot going for her. She’s confident,'” Owen recalls. “But I never actually ever said anything to her about it — it was flirtatious until it was a few weeks after that … I was in the store, and I said ‘Hey, you wanna get a beer sometime? I don’t know if that’s professional enough to ask because you’ve only helped me in a professional way, but I figured if I didn’t ask you for beer, I’d never know if you would wanna go get one.’
“She was like, ‘Sure, let’s go,'” he adds. “So, we went to the Red Pony in Franklin” — and, clearly, it worked out well.
Owen and Hartlein welcomed baby Paris into their family in late April of 2019. She is Owen’s second child, following older sister Pearl, who was born on Thanksgiving (Nov. 22) in 2012, to the singer and his first wife, Lacey Buchanan.
Owen and Buchanan divorced in 2015, after three years of marriage. They met on the set of his “8 Second Ride” music video, released in 2009