Bachelorette Charity Lawson Will Have 2 Weddings — but Not a ’17-Year-Length Engagement’ (Exclusive)
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Charity Lawson tells PEOPLE she and her fiancé Dotun Olubeko are “super happy to get our lives started” after getting engaged on Monday’s ‘Bachelorette’ finale
This post contains spoilers from Monday’s finale of The Bachelorette.
Charity Lawson and Dotun Olubeko are ready for their future!
After getting engaged on Monday’s Bachelorette finale, Dotun, 30, tells PEOPLE he and Charity hope to move in together “as soon as possible.”
“We love to be around each other — it’s hard to be apart — so we want to make that happen ASAP,” Dotun says. “We can’t wait.”
While they haven’t settled on a wedding date, Charity wants to have a year-and-a-half engagement and thinks she and Dotun will tie the knot in 2025 or 2026.
“We’re not really trying to have a super incredibly 17-year length engagement,” the child and family therapist tells PEOPLE. “We obviously came here to find love, and we have successfully done that. So [we’re] super happy to get our lives started.”
The couple will likely have two weddings, one traditional Nigerian affair to honor Dotun’s heritage, and a standard American one.
“I definitely am open to having two weddings,” Charity says. “We’ll see what that looks like. But me and Dotun talk a lot about the Nigerian wedding and if ABC will film that one, so we’ll see!”
In the meantime, Dotun and Charity look forward to taking their relationship public now that the finale has aired.
“It’s the little things. It’s just living life,” Dotun says of what he anticipates doing with Charity. “It’s going to be grocery shopping, concerts and hanging out with friends. It’s really basic. We’re looking forward to it all, though. We’ve been doing our best to live lives apart and in hiding. And in everything we do, we’re always like, ‘I wish you were here.’”
Charity adds, “The fact that we don’t have to hide anymore is going to be great. Simple things — going on a walk down the street, going to the grocery store, going to a concert, being able to experience the things that brings us the most joy together — I am super excited about. We don’t care about anything else besides just being together.”
Charity calls the time she spent with Dotun since The Bachelorette wrapped “so beautiful” and notes “our relationship has grown in so many ways.”
“I feel like it never truly stops growing,” she says. “We are so in sync, it’s crazy. We’re so similar.”
The Bachelorette admits she saw “signs from the beginning all the way to the end” that pointed her towards Dotun. He describes those signs as “very metaphysical” and “very spiritual.”
“For instance, bungee jumping,” Dotun says, referring to his first one-on-one date with Charity. “The weather was tracking with how we were feeling and our emotions at that time: it was raining and pouring and we were both scared. Then we were like, ‘Let’s do this thing.’ The sun peeked out, and then we did it, and there’s a big rainbow. So it’s these little signs that we both were like, it feels like something is telling us that this is a thing. You’re like, ‘There’s no way that that’s coincidence.’”
Dotun thinks their Bachelorette journey “was meant for us” and that that first one-on-one “was huge” for their relationship.
“That’s when things were solidified,” the integrative medicine specialist said. “By the end of the night after our dinner portion, I had no doubt that I was fully involved with this woman. It brought us so much closer, bonding over the jump. And doing it twice again on our own accord was foreshadowing what type of future and partnership we would have. That’s when I really realized, this is wifey material. And I started acting in that way throughout the rest of the filming.”
Throughout Dotun’s journey on the show, Charity says she tried to be “extremely transparent” with him, although she didn’t want to reveal where she stood with the other men.
“I didn’t disclose where I stood with the other guys; I didn’t want to do that, that doesn’t do him any benefit of disclosing that,” she says. “So at hometowns, Dotun was one of the first people that I told I was falling in love with. And then getting to Fiji, that just truly just solidified where I was like, ‘Yeah, this man has to be it.’”
During Monday’s finale, Dotun got down on one knee and gave what Charity calls “truly the best proposal speech ever.”
“Once I saw Dotun, I was just at peace and I was so excited,” Charity says of her engagement day. “I was ready to say yes to forever with him.”
Related: Every ‘Bachelor’ and ‘Bachelorette’ Couple: Where Are They Now?
However, Dotun realized Charity might choose Joey Graziadei over him.
“As happy as I was to have the potential, part of you knows that if you don’t get what you want, you’re going to be devastated and that’s going to be a tough thing to deal with,” he says. “You realize, I dropped my life and I took this risk and I found someone that I loved and are they going to choose me?’ I couldn’t speak throughout most of the day. I think I might’ve said, outside of the proposal, 10 words coherently. It was a lot of tears.”
Dotun found the proposal day to be “the toughest, most emotional day” of the entire season for him.
“It’s one of the weirdest days of my life, for sure, because of the emotions that come with it,” he continues. “It’s an extremely emotional proposal out of fear that she doesn’t choose me. But I was so happy that she did.”
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