“Real Housewives of New Jersey” star Dolores Catania is about to be a real wife again, as she’s engaged to longtime love Paulie Connell after he popped the question at the Garden State Apple Store where the two first met.
The “ecstatic” reigning champion of “The Traitors,” 54, and 51-year-old Connell spoke together to People about the proposal on Nov. 10, four years to the day after they moved in together.
“I feel so blessed, I almost feel guilty! Like I don’t deserve to be loved this way,” said Catania, who joined Bravo’s “Housewives” in 2009. “I’ve never been so sure of something ever.”
Wanting “the element of the surprise,” Connell said he hoped the proposal would “feel grounded and natural and organic,” so he asked Catania to marry him after dragging her back to the Woodcliff Lake Apple Store, about 28 miles northwest of Midtown Manhattan.
Catania nearly mistook her fiancé’s “sweating” and “beet red” face for a medical emergency.
“You know how people say weird things when they’re having a stroke? He started saying these sweet, beautiful things to me out of nowhere and I was like, ‘Paul, are you OK?’” she recalled. “And then I realized he was proposing.”
The marriage will be Catania’s second, following her union to ex-husband Frank, with whom she shares son Frankie Jr. and daughter Gabby.
Frankie Jr. also got engaged earlier this year, when he popped the question to Nicole Perricho at Manhattan’s famed St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
