In fact, they came thisclose to marrying other people in their early twenties until her father intervened. “The night of her sister’s graduation party, we were buddies and I was there. I’d loved that girl since high school, and I told her father how I felt,” he recalled in a 2019 interview with HITS Daily Double. “He said, ‘If you don’t tell her, I’m going to.'”
His next move was “a total Ryan Gosling moment,” he told the outlet. “I said to her, ‘I just want to kiss you one time. If you don’t feel anything, we can go back to being friends.'” Spoiler alert: He got the girl, Akins writing in her book, ”That one moment, that one kiss on my parents’ front porch, changed everything.”
Because there he was, some six months later, making another bold move. “Me and Lauren are big on drinking wine and signing the bottles with a silver sharpie,” he explained to Taste of Country. So one night, just ahead of Christmas, he gathered both of their families in a private room at her favorite Nashville spot, Giovanni’s. “There was a bottle of wine sitting there. I pulled out a sharpie and put ‘Marry me’ on the bottle.”