On Christmas Eve 2024, in the quiet of their Tennessee ranch, Rex Linn asked Reba McEntire to marry him, turning a love story that had waited more than three decades into a promise for forever.
That tender moment arrived nearly five years after pandemic travel rules kept them in separate time zones and almost thirty years after they first met on the 1991 television movie The Gambler Returns.
They had stayed friendly for decades after that first meeting, but life kept them on different paths until early 2020, when they crossed paths again while both were working on Young Sheldon alongside McEntire’s longtime friend and co-star Melissa Peterman.
In late January 2020, Linn invited McEntire out for dinner in Los Angeles, and the group stopped afterward at a wine bar down the street. When the server mentioned tater tots were on the appetizer menu, McEntire raised her hand right away. Linn, known for handing out nicknames, christened her ‘Tater Tot’ on the spot, and she soon answered by calling him ‘Sugar Tot’.
Weeks later, March lockdowns left Linn in California while McEntire remained in Oklahoma and Tennessee. That same month, McEntire lost her mother, Jacqueline, after a battle with cancer, leaving the singer to grieve while cut off from normal travel.
Unable to fly to see each other, the two began a daily FaceTime habit they called ‘Coffee Camp’. Every morning from March through June, they poured coffee and talked across time zones about childhood stories, family history, personal fears, and daily routines. Both in their sixties, they spent those months building their bond without physical dates, sharing laughter and steady company through a phone screen before they ever had a chance to go on a second physical date.
Those morning conversations built an intimacy they might have rushed past in a normal courtship.
When travel eased on June 16, 2020, they finally reunited in person and have barely spent time apart since. That fall, McEntire confirmed on her Living and Learning podcast that their thirty-year friendship had grown into a relationship.
Once television sets reopened, they began choosing projects that allowed them to work in the same city. In 2022, they played a married couple named Sunny and Buck Barnes on the third season of the ABC drama Big Sky, and the following year they co-starred in the Lifetime film Reba McEntire’s The Hammer.
Those nicknames from their first dinner in 2020 followed them to work as well. When McEntire joined The Voice as a coach in 2023, she wheeled out a custom tater tot cart to welcome new singers to her team, while Linn surprised her in television dressing rooms with bowls of tots and ketchup.
By the fall of 2024, the couple brought their partnership to network comedy on the NBC sitcom Happy’s Place, once again working with Peterman. McEntire took the lead role as tavern owner Bobbie, with Linn playing the tavern’s short-order cook Emmett, a pairing that gradually grew into an onscreen romance.
Behind the scenes, their offscreen future took a quieter step forward during the 2024 holidays. Although Linn proposed at their ranch on Christmas Eve, the couple kept the news private for nine months, choosing first to step back when devastating wildfires hit the Los Angeles area in January 2025.
They finally shared the engagement publicly while walking the red carpet together at the Primetime Emmy Awards in September 2025. For McEntire, who had been married twice before, the decision held special meaning because Linn had never been married and wanted to experience that commitment with her.
Rather than rushing into a formal ceremony, the two kept putting work and daily life at the ranch first as Happy’s Place continued filming and Linn took on a role in the series Stick. When McEntire spoke about their eventual wedding plans, she skipped formal traditions in favor of good food, close friends, and their animals on the property, including longhorns, horses, donkeys, and two dogs named Watson and Belle.
More than six years after a plate of appetizers and a string of morning FaceTime calls got them through a lonely spring, ‘The Tots’ are still sharing their morning coffee under the same roof.