Real-Life Love
Jenna Bush Hager Confesses She & Her Friends ‘Shared’ Boyfriends in College
Before finding love with her husband, Henry Hager, Jenna Bush Hager shared some of her romantic partners with her closest friends.
On the Friday, August 15, episode of Today With Jenna & Friends, Bush Hager and her guest host, Erin Andrews, discussed how Jennifer Aniston revealed in her new Vanity Fair cover story that she and Gwyneth Paltrow have chatted together about their mutual ex, Brad Pitt.
“Anybody that have dated the same person or even have a person in the mutual circle, there is conversations,” Bush Hager noted before sharing some surprising information about her dating past.
“I’ve never dated the same person as [someone I know], that I can think of. I definitely, in college, we all sort of shared,” Bush Hager stated, prompting shocked responses from Andrews and the show’s off-camera crew.
After Andrews asked for more details, Bush Hager shared, “I had a high school boyfriend. He was handsome. Other people dated him. That’s okay. I was okay with it, because I knew that if I wanted him back, I could probably [get him back].”
NBC
Bush Hager met her husband in 2004, the same year she graduated from the University of Texas at Austin. The two tied the knot in 2008 and have since welcomed three kids together — daughters Mila, 12, and Poppy, 10, and son Hal, 6.
Since joining the fourth hour of Today in 2019, Jenna said she made a surprising love life connection with one of the show’s crew members. “There is a friend on this show of mine, and her husband and my husband dated the same girl,” she told Andrews. “We did bond over it right away.”
She continued, “We put all of these things together, just as women. We figured out the timeline. We realized they had the same type. … We became really good friends.”
Andrews, for her part, told Bush Hager that she’s “never dated the same person as one of my good friends.” However, Andrews said that she and her Calm Down podcast cohost, Charissa Thompson, “tend to like the same kind of guy.”
Andrews wed her husband, Jarret Stoll, in 2017, and the two welcomed their son, Mack, via surrogate in 2023.
On a February episode of Jenna & Friends, Bush Hager revealed that her high school boyfriend used to call her father, former president George W. Bush, “Big George.”
“He did? How long did that last?” her guest host, Willie Geist, asked. She replied, “He lasted a long time because he was handsome. But my dad — you know when you’re in those moments — it only works when you’re young, because when you’re in those moments, you’re like, ‘Oh god, this is not good.’ But you can somewhat brush it over.”
Today With Jenna & Friends, Weekdays, 10 a.m. ET, NBC
