Winnie Harlow Is Engaged to NBA Player Kyle Kuzma

Winnie Harlow is getting ready to strut down the aisle!

The model, 30, got engaged to NBA star Kyle Kuzma, a small forward on the Milwaukee Bucks, on Feb. 13.

The couple announced the happy news via a joint Instagram post on Tuesday, Feb. 18. The post featured a series of photos of the pair posing together on a plane. Harlow excitedly shows off her dazzling engagement ring in several of the snaps.

The couple shared all the details of the intimate proposal with Vogue, telling the magazine that they had set off on a planned vacation to the Turks and Caicos. Kuzma chartered a private plane for the occasion, and filled it with red roses, balloons, chocolate and champagne. An unsuspecting Harlow thought all of the romantic accoutrements were simply for Valentine’s Day — but as it turned out, Kuzma had a much bigger surprise up his sleeve.

After boarding the plane, the athlete asked Harlow to sit down next to him and he began to read her a poem he had written, per Vogue. “For a split second in my head I thought, ‘This would be so cute if this was an engagement,’ ” Harlow recalled to the outlet. “But I’m also not the type of person who wants to guess or wants to spoil a surprise. So it just was a fleeting thought in my head.”

Her hunch was confirmed when Kuzma recited the final line of his heartfelt poem: “Will you marry me?” He then presented her with an 8.5-carat, oval-cut diamond ring, which he spent three months designing himself — with no prior input from Harlow.

“I never really asked her what type of ring she liked or anything,” he told Vogue. “I just wanted to draw a picture of what I felt resembled her — something that was elegant, but very timeless and simplistic at the same time.”

After the couple landed on the Caribbean island, Harlow excitedly started dialing up her loved ones to tell them the news. But her sister didn’t pick up and her mom abruptly ended the call after saying she didn’t have time to talk. When Harlow and Kuzma got to their villa, it all made sense: Both of their families were waiting to join in the celebration in person.

The group enjoyed an elegant dinner on the beach, capped off with a fireworks display. Now that she and Kuzma are engaged and looking forward to a wedding, they are feeling “over the moon,” she told Vogue.

The couple first connected online during the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, Harlow told the late Stephen “tWitch” Boss while appearing on The Ellen Degeneres Show in 2020. She shared that their relationship was almost a missed connection because Kuzma first tried to reach out to her on Instagram in 2019 — but she never got the message.

However, once they started talking, they never wanted to stop. After a few months of chatting nearly 24/7, Harlow decided to move from New York City to Los Angeles to be with Kuzma, who played for the L.A. Lakers at the time.

The PEOPLE Puzzler crossword is here! How quickly can you solve it? Play now!

“And I’ve been in L.A. ever since. That was a year ago,” Harlow said on The Ellen Degeneres Show in 2021. The pair officially started dating in April 2020 and were first spotted together in public just weeks later and were Instagram official by that June.

The pair had to withstand breakup rumors, but were going strong in August 2022 when Kuzma opened up about his relationship with the supermodel to PEOPLE, noting that he inspires her to experiment with fashion.

“We always bounce ideas off each other,” he said at the time. “[Winnie] has a lot of style, too, and that’s one of the things that’s connecting me to her and you know we love fashion, we love art, we love clothing.”

While they were taking the GQ Couples Quiz together in February 2023, Kuzma revealed just how far he went for Harlow in the beginning of their relationship in 2020.

“The pandemic [had] just started, and this was at the time nobody was flying in airports because it was like low-key sketchy,” he recalled. “So, I was like, ‘Alright, well, you need to fly out here private.’ This was the first time we met. I really wanted to see her and the safest thing was that jet. And that’s how we found love.”

In a funny moment shared on Instagram in July 2023, Harlow proved she was just as dedicated to her man as he was to her when she jumped on Kuzma’s lap to avoid an Usher serenade when they went to the singer’s concert together.

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. 

 “Okay, you chose,” Usher joked, respectfully walking past the lovebirds.

Harlow took her declaration of love even further a month later when she revealed she got a tattoo reading “Kyle” inked behind her ear in cursive.