Lauren Alaina, 24, Confirms She’s Dating John Crist, 35, 5 Mos. After Breaking Off Engagement

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Less than six months since ending her 7-year relationship with fiancé Alex Hopkins, country music singer Lauren Alaina, 24, has found love again – and she was going to keep this a secret until Bobby Bones got involved! When Lauren stopped by his radio show on May 15, Bobby pressed Lauren about the “dude” hanging around her in the hallway (h/t The Tennessean.) After a little bit of stalling, a blushing Lauren finally spilled the tea: “This is my boyfriend, John Crist.”

That’s not all Lauren revealed, as she explained how the two first connected: “I responded to one of his Instagram videos,” she said. (“We call it sliding into the DMs,” John, 35, quipped.) “I said, ‘ha ha, you’re funny.’ And then he said… and this is true…he said ‘I, too, grew up performing in Church in Georgia. I was like, ‘Does this guy know everything about me?’” John, who was clearly embarrassed by how that line was the first thing he ever said to her, said that he saw the blue check mark by her name and hit up her Wikipedia page. Thus, a love connection was made.

“We joke that the only reason we’re here is because she had a blue check mark by her name,” he said. While it’s unsure when Lauren slid into John’s DMs, she posted a picture of the two of them together in February. “Does going to a @johnbcrist show make me more of a CRISTian? #ForSureNo #CheckYourHeart.”

John is best known for “viral videos like “’ Millennial International,’ ‘Road Rage in the Church Parking Lot,’ or ‘Every Parent at Disney,’ “ according to his official page. John has shared the stage with comedians like Dave Chappelle, Jeff Foxworthy, Seth Meyers, Larry the Cable Guy, Trevor Noah, Dana Carvey, Adam Carolla, Chris D’Elia, Anjelah Johnson, Tim Hawkins, and Louie Anderson. Like he said to Bobby Bones, he grew up in Georgia in a religious household. ““Shoot, I grew up in the deep south, my dad is a pastor, and I was the third of eight homeschooled children. My first job was at Chick-fil-A. Coming from a background like that, how do you NOT write jokes?!” he says on his site.

Lauren’s new relationship comes around five months after she and Alex Hopkins, the man she had been dating since 2012, had decided to call off their engagement. “While we still have love for each other, we’ve grown into very different people over the last six years,” she said in a statement posted on Jan. 21. “We are now in a place where we are each looking forward to starting our own fresh, new chapters of our lives. We both love and respect each other and hope you all will do the same. This has not been an easy decision, but we both feel it is the right decision. Thank you always for your love and support.”