Originally appeared on E! Online
While Lady Gaga's engagement to Michael Polansky was confirmed at the 2024 Olympics, the news was not supposed to be born this way.
However, the Grammy winner appears unbothered that it was accidentally made public in July when a video of herself introducing her longtime partner as her "fiancé" to French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal at a crowded Olympic event was posted on the politician's TikTok.
"The prime minister actually had his people filming us while they were saying hello and they caught me saying, 'Oh, this is my fiancé,'" Gaga said on the Sept. 27 episode of the "Graham Norton Show." "And I was trying to keep it hidden, but then they announced it to everyone. But that was kind of fun."
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At the time the engagement news was confirmed, rumors the two planned to marry had already been swirling, as the "Shallow" singer was photographed in April wearing a giant diamond ring on her ring finger. The 38-year-old told Graham Norton that her partner proposed to her the 1st of that month — April Fools' Day.
"Actually, I thought he was joking and he was not," Gaga said. "But it was really nice."
She and Polansky, a tech investor, first sparked romance rumors when they were photographed kissing at a 2020 New Year's party in Las Vegas.
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The following February, Gaga hard-launched their relationship on Instagram when the two attended the Super Bowl together. Earlier this month, they made their red carpet debut as a couple at the premiere of "Joker: Folie à Deux" at the Venice Film Festival. Michael also joined Gaga at the more recent U.K. premiere of the film Sept. 25.
Her mom, Cynthia Germanotta, had introduced the lovebirds.
"She said, ‘I just met your husband,’" Gaga told "Access Hollywood" in an interview released Sept. 23. “And I was like, ‘I’m not ready to meet my husband!’”
The Oscar winner — who was previously engaged to Christian Carino and Taylor Kinney — later took her mother up on the offer to introduce her to Polansky, who cofounded the Parker Foundation with Napster cofounder Sean Parker.
"He was at a birthday party at Sean Parker’s house," Gaga said. “He was just the most amazing man I’d ever met. We talked for, like, three hours and then I couldn’t find him, but then he called me."
The two had met during lockdown at the start of the COVID pandemic.
"We had this amazing chapter of a weird kind of normalcy that’s essential for any relationship to develop in a real way," Polansky told Vogue in an interview published Sept. 5, nothing the two enjoyed spending time "taking walks, making coffee, hanging out with the dogs, reading books together."
He continued, "She’s used to being isolated because of her fame and was able to take so much of it in stride. I think she loved the chance to slow down."
