Khloé Kardashian may have rejected Tristan Thompson‘s first proposal, but PEOPLE has learned she accepted a second proposal — and the off-again couple were secretly engaged for nine months.
Kardashian, 38, revealed to sister Kim Kardashian on Thursday’s episode of The Kardashians that she said no to Thompson, 31, when he initially asked her to marry him. Now a source tells PEOPLE that proposal occurred in December 2019.
Despite lingering concerns about Thompson’s infidelity, the couple had rekindled when he popped the question a second time, and Kardashian said yes around February 2021.
Jerritt Clark/Getty
That year, the couple were seriously plan to conceive a second child together. The pair’s first child, daughter True, was born in April 2018 on the immediate heels of Kardashian’s first public embarrassment over Thompson’s cheating.
RELATED: Khloé Kardashian and Tristan Thompson’s Relationship Timeline
Through a surrogate, Kardashian and Thompson successfully conceived a second child in the final weeks of 2021 — just as news broke that Thompson had fathered a baby with another woman, Maralee Nichols.
At that point, Kardashian called off the secret engagement in December 2021.
The pair welcomed their son, whose name is not yet known, this past August.
Kardashian allowed Thompson into the room to meet the infant, admitting, “I’ve been on the fence about letting Tristan come to the hospital or not, but Tristan wants to be here so I just figured, why not let him come? I’ll never get this moment back.”
RELATED: Tristan Thompson Met Son He Shares with Khloé Kardashian in Hospital: ‘He Wants to Be Here’
HULU Khloé Kardashian and Tristan Thompson with their son
On the latest episode of The Kardashians, Kim alluded to the somewhat squishy timeline of Thompson’s proposals. “I’ll never forget Tristan calling me and he was gonna propose to her on Valentine’s Day, which was a year since they had drama so this was last Valentine’s Day,” she said. “And then I called him the day after and I was like, ‘Hey, I never heard anything from Khloé. Oh my god, did you propose?’ and he was like, ‘Oh yeah, I did in December.’ Oh my God, she didn’t tell us!”
But once the couple did decide to make it official, they kept that information to themselves and off the show.
RELATED: Khloé Kardashian Shares First Look into Son’s Birth as She Puts Tristan Thompson ‘Trauma’ Behind Her
The Good American founder explained her reasons behind her initial refusal to get engaged on this week’s Kardashians.
“I said, ‘I need to make sure this is a totally different relationship because I wanna be proud to say I’m engaged to anyone,'” she recalled. “And that’s why I said, ‘I’m not comfortable accepting this right now because I’m not excited to tell my family,’ and as hurtful as that probably was for him to hear, it was the truth. I’m not ever gonna accept something or give someone false hope, and I said that to him.”
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty
“Going through what I went through was Tristan was incredibly hard,” she later acknowledged in a confessional. “The hardest part about it all is training yourself to un-love someone. This was my life for six years. And we weren’t just a couple, we genuinely were best friends. He was my workout buddy, we did all these things together. And so learning how to undo all those things, that takes time. Just because someone does you dirty doesn’t mean you fall out of love with them instantly.”
News of the secret engagement was previously reported by BuzzFeed and Entertainment Tonight Canada.
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New episodes of The Kardashians drop every Thursday on Hulu.
