Jenna Bush Hager reflected on being a “chubby” child and dreaming about her wedding when a boy would “like me.”
Bush Hager and her co-host, Hoda Kotb, were talking about how they each thought of love and relationships when they were younger when Bush Hager revealed she was more focused on someone wanting to choose her.
“I remember being a pudgy little kid singing, ‘Matchmaker, Matchmaker make me a match’ at a little voice competition where I couldn’t really sing and as a prop, which this was my creativity, I had a bridal magazine,” she said on Friday’s episode of “Today with Hoda & Jenna.”
The television personality impersonated a younger version of herself flipping through the magazine and singing the “Fiddler on the Roof” song.
“So I was a third grader being chubby singing, ‘Matchmaker, matchmaker,'” she said.
Bush Hager, 41, explained that she would just “stare at the magazine and dream about a boy liking me” and “dream of the wedding as opposed to the life.”
“I think it’s because nobody liked me, so that was my fantasy is when will the person like me? When will I be chosen?” she remembered.
Meanwhile, Kotb, 59, said she was the opposite and focused more on the person than the wedding and even let her mom pick out her wedding dress for her 2005 wedding to Burzis Kanga. (They got divorced three years later.)
“I think people do things, because it’s time, or some people get nervous all their friends are getting married, so it’s like, ‘Oh gosh well you know what I actually understand this guy and I’ve been with him long enough it’ll be fine,’ but if you’re thinking it’ll be fine, it’s not good enough,” Kotb said.
Luckily for Bush Hager, she didn’t have to worry about that, since she fell in love with – and even gave a marital ultimatum to – now-husband, Henry Hager.
The two got married in 2008 and share three children together: daughters Margaret “Mila” Laura, 10, and Poppy Louise, 8, and son, Hal, 4.
The former first daughter has previously talked about her struggles with body-shaming and shared how her middle school boyfriend dumped her after seeing her in a swimsuit on an April episode of the NBC talk show.
“It’s so interesting because people really do hit you right where it hurts. I had a boyfriend in seventh grade who broke up with me after we went swimming together – after he saw me in a bathing suit,” she said at the time.
Bush Hager also previously reflected on a time when she didn’t “wear a bikini for years” after her grandmother, Barbara Bush, told her she was “looking chubby.”
Her grandma later apologized for the comment and said her own mother, Pauline Pierce, “said those types of things” to her growing up.
