Joe Jonas is Engaged and For Some Reason I'm Crying

In case you weren't aware, Exactly 17 minutes ago Joe Jonas announced his engagement to Game of Thrones actress, Sophie Turner and I cried.

Were you not aware that people still cared about the Jonas Brothers? I definitely still do, so it was extremely upsetting to me to find this information out when I was not aware they were even dating. How could a devoted Jonas fan such as myself miss this kind of information for an entire year? I'm not sad, I'm just disappointed. In myself.

I was a devoted Jonas fan in my youth. Well, not really youth. more like late high school and into college. I was probably a bit older than the average fan at the time. Though I was passionate about my adoration of the band, I was reigned in a bit by my parents' sanity (thank you for that). In college once tried to skip my first day of classes to find them at the oceanfront when i found out they were spending a post-show day off in Virginia Beach. My mom, lovingly, refused to give me the car keys.

A couple of years later I had a full on meltdown upon discovery that the Brothers were staying in a hotel connected to the office I was interning in. I happened to be traveling for a work event in Missouri that day and had to take a break to calm myself of my devastation.

As a church girl in the mid-2000s, the Jonas Brothers represented everything I wanted in a man (or boy?). They were handsome, cool, well-dressed. Their dad was a pastor and all three of them wore purity rings at the time. They were the Good Kid Dream Boys. When Taylor Swift sang about having her heart broken by Joe Jonas, so did I.

I was an awkward, insecure teenager with zero relationship experience. The Jonas Brothers were all I had. I was so riddled with insecurity about my body, my personality and pretty much everything about myself that I couldn't fathom anyone in real life liking me. So I kept to my fantasy world where I was convinced I was going to marry Joe Jonas out of fear of facing the loneliness that reality would bring.

One of the biggest breakthroughs in my journey to self-acceptance was years later when Joe Jonas had moved on from his Disney Channel past and had become the frontman for DNCE. The video for their second single Toothbrush starred plus size-supermodel Ashley Graham as Jonas's love interest.

For the first time in my life I could see someone that looks like myself as being desirable to someone that is more traditionally attractive in a way that was more realistic and less of a punchline. I have always tied my body image to romantic relationship and my lack thereof. I had already admired Ashley Graham for how she has managed to present her body type as sexy and romantically appealing in a way that is humanized rather than fetishized. So seeing someone that looks like me with someone that I had always had a crush on was absolutely groundbreaking for me.

I have since moved on from my JoBro obsession and learned how to live a bit more in reality. I am definitely not still convinced that Joe and I are going to get married. But at the age of 26 I do still sleep in a room with my Jonas autographs proudly framed on my dresser. Congrats, guys.