Joe Budden is coming into a brand new chapter along with his longtime girlfriend, Shadée Monique.
The rapper and podcast host proposed to Monique after seven years collectively, making the second official simply in the future earlier than his forty sixth birthday on Aug. 31.
The proposal was captured in an Instagram Reel shared by veteran hip-hop journalist Elliott Wilson. Within the clip, Budden prepares to pop the query as these across the couple look on.
Budden and Monique started courting in the summertime of 2019 and celebrated their seventh anniversary in July. Whereas the couple didn’t instantly make their relationship a significant a part of their public lives, they progressively grew to become extra open about their romance on social media. By 2022, Budden was publicly celebrating their anniversary on-line.
For longtime listeners of Budden’s podcasts, nevertheless, Monique is hardly a stranger.
The Houston native has grow to be a well-known presence inside Budden’s increasing media world, sometimes chiming in from behind the scenes on “The Joe Budden Podcast.” The couple additionally hosts “Pod Wives,” the place conversations about their relationship have included discussions about marriage, making the engagement much less of a shock to those that observe them carefully.
Outdoors of podcasting, Monique is an entrepreneur and operates Bawdy Necessities, a clothes boutique.
The engagement arrives throughout one other interval of growth for Budden, who has spent a lot of the previous decade reworking himself from rapper and actuality tv persona into one in all hip-hop media’s most recognizable impartial voices.
As theGrio beforehand reported, Budden not too long ago expanded the Joe Budden Community into true crime with “Crime in America,” a weekly collection developed with Wolf Leisure and Advance Native’s Headline Studio. The challenge pairs Budden’s commentary with reporting from journalists masking felony instances in native communities.
That transfer is just the most recent extension of a media profession constructed largely round “The Joe Budden Podcast,” the place music, tradition, politics and relationships frequently grow to be the topic of prolonged conversations and debates.
Relationships have additionally been a part of Budden’s public story for years.
Again in 2013, whereas showing on VH1’s “Love & Hip Hop,” Budden spoke with theGrio about relationship expectations inside hip-hop and what he seen because the style’s outdated concepts about masculinity and romance. On the time, he argued that artists ought to have extra room to debate love and real-life relationships with out these themes being dismissed as incompatible with rap tradition.
Greater than a decade later, his relationship with Monique has unfolded throughout a really totally different stage of his life and profession.
Budden has beforehand been engaged. His extremely publicized relationships, together with with former “Love & Hip Hop” co-star Tahiry Jose, had been as soon as intertwined with actuality tv and leisure headlines. His relationship with Monique, by comparability, has largely developed alongside the media enterprise he has constructed since stepping away from recording music.
The couple has not introduced a marriage date or shared further particulars about their plans.
For now, the proposal marks a milestone after seven years collectively and arrives as Budden prepares to have a good time his forty sixth birthday.
