How 'Queer Eye' co-star Karamo Brown literally swept fiancé Ian Jordan off his feet

Welcome to Yahoo Lifestyle, Pride Edition, commemorating June — Pride Month — with a collection of stories celebrating the resilience of LGBTQ people, such as celebs like Adam Rippon and Munroe Bergdorf, trans women finding their inner power through a unique beauty clinic, and queer youth receiving vital support from their gay elders after aging out of the foster system. And so, as they shout in the streets: “We’re here, we’re queer — get used to it!”

Queer Eye co-star Karamo Brown is the ultimate culture expert, well-versed in all things lifestyle. But when it came to capturing the heart of now-fiancé Ian Jordan, it didn’t go as smoothly as one might think.

The two met in 2010, Brown told Yahoo Lifestyle. When walking out of a nightclub in Los Angeles, Brown spotted Jordan — a handsome stranger — and playfully came up behind him and scooped him off the ground.

“When I picked him up,” Brown recalled, “he started hitting my head, saying, ‘Put me down!’ And when I put him down, he looked at me and said, ‘Oh, hey, you can pick me back up.’”

“When I picked him up, he started hitting my head, saying, ‘Put me down!’ And when I put him down, he looked at me and said, ‘Oh, hey, you can pick me back up.’”

Brown invited Jordan to his birthday party that very weekend — but Jordan, naturally, went home to do some Facebook investigating. He noticed that Brown’s relationship status was set to “in a relationship,” so he decided to forgo the party.

“Even though I went home and literally told every member of my family I had met the man I was going to spend the rest of my life with,” Brown said, he had forgotten to change his status after a past relationship had ended.

“I feel bad about it now,” Jordan says.

“Sometimes when you know, you just know,” Brown stated. “It was something about his soul, connecting with my soul; I just knew.”

The two might have had a rocky start, with opposite styles of communication — “I was a little bit more guarded than Karamo,” Jordan said — but after just a month, the couple got on the same page.

“I felt really connected to him. I could feel this going somewhere. I really liked the idea of family,” he said, after explaining how he had wanted to gain the approval of Brown’s two sons from a previous relationship.

In May, Brown proposed to Jordan during a surprise birthday party of a lifetime, and they are planning their wedding for October 2020.

“It’s funny, because I’m good at making other people cry, but I never really have those releases,” Brown said. “So the fact that Ian always really brings that out in me,” he said, really means a lot.

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