For HGTV star Erin Napier, her engagement ring represents an incredible sacrifice her then fiancé Ben Napier made and their love ever since.
“It rained for two months, and so our basement flooded,” Erin wrote in an early July Instagram post. “Ben keeps a shoebox of things that were special to him as a boy down there. Inside it are photos from high school, school and sports awards, colorful notes from girls who were cheering for him at the game, and this.”
She shared a photo of a “retail installment contract” signed by Ben in September 2007 for her engagement ring.
“He had it all spread out on the stairs drying, and I felt a lump in my throat seeing the dollar amount for what he sacrificed and worked so hard to give me when he could barely afford gas for his truck senior year at Ole Miss,” Erin reflected. “I didn’t expect it at all and would’ve married him with a dandelion tied around my finger.”
The couple met at Jones College in Ellisville, Mississippi, before both transferred to and graduated from the University of Mississippi. Ben proposed in 2007, and they married the following year, TV Insider reported.
The couple celebrated their 17th anniversary last November.
Related: The Sweet Story Behind Erin Napier’s Mother’s Day Surprise
“Do you know what it’s like to be married to him? I would like to write it down for myself and the girls to know: it is all encompassing delight. He delights in delighting, always everywhere, it is his first instinct,” Erin posted about Ben.
“He protects and treasures me so clearly I never, ever, wonder his intentions,” she continued. “My God has been so good to let us grow up together, to let me be positively ruined and spoiled by Ben Napier.”
Some of their top marriage advice? Believing the best about your spouse and communicating openly.
“The secret to mine and Ben’s marriage, the reason I think we have a happy marriage with very, very little conflict, is that I don’t let myself tell stories about him,” Erin said on “The Heirloom” podcast last year. “I just say it. I say it right to him. ‘Are you doing this? Are you thinking that?’ And he says right back to me what he’s really doing and thinking. We’re together all day, so it’s very easy for us to do that, but our communication level cuts out my creativity in a very good, positive way.”
While the duo host the mega popular HOME TOWN HGTV show, they make sure their daughters, Helen and Mae, always take priority.
“My kids are the most important thing that we’ve made,” Erin said.
The Napiers really have the sweetest love story.
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