The Ultimatum’s Dave Adams and Vanessa Hattaway Are Engaged: ‘A Lifetime Love’ (Exclusive)

Dave Adams and Vanessa Hattaway are getting married!

After going on season 3 of The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On and leaving the show together early, PEOPLE can exclusively confirm that the pair are now engaged.

“We’ve made some really big life jumps or moved on to so many chapters since The Ultimatum filming, which was about a little more than a year ago,” Adams, 34, tells PEOPLE. “We’re super happy, everything’s been great.”

Adams and Hattaway, 30, started dating four years ago. Earlier this month, they made their debut on season 3 of the Netflix reality show after Hattaway issued him the ultimatum. However, the pair’s journey on the show was short-lived as they exited together after just four episodes, once Hattaway started to develop concerns about her trial marriage partner, Nick Tramontin.

After leaving early, Adams and Hattaway returned for the season 3 reunion to confirm they were still together and an engagement was “coming soon.”

Just three weeks later, on Friday, Nov. 22, Adams tells PEOPLE he popped the question while they were visiting Hattaway’s family in Georgia.

“I wanted to do it with all of our family around, and some live in Italy, some live in Georgia, some live in Massachusetts and Miami, so it’s really tough to get everybody together, and Thanksgiving was kind of that time, so it just worked out naturally,” he explains. “So we went to Georgia to hang out for a week with some family, and that’s where it happened.”

For weeks before their trip, Adams had been secretly hiring musicians and a photographer, as well as working with Hattaway’s mother behind the scenes to organize the surprise engagement. Then, the big day finally arrived.

“Vanessa’s best friend took her out to lunch on Friday, which gave me and the family time to set the scene,” Dave recalls. “When Vanessa came back from lunch, she was so happy that she started scream-sobbing. It was a special day set in a beautifully forested Atlanta suburb with the people we care about most.”

After Hattaway said yes, their family “sprinted out of hiding and surprised both of us with bear hugs,” Adams says. “Two musicians joined the party and serenaded the group over hors d’oeuvres and cocktails. Vanessa’s father prepared a legendary brisket and we ate our way through happy nerves. It was perfect — the brisket and the engagement.”

The couple plan to get married sometime in 2025, but already know they want it to be “somewhere exotic, but also accessible for family and friends.” They’ve also taken some other big steps towards the future by purchasing a house in Southern California.

“After the show, we were in a state of shock,” Adams says. “We actually went to Washington state, and went to the middle of nowhere for a week, which was awesome, recovered from that a little bit. And then we saved up over the last few years and bought a house in September.”

“We are broke now,” he jokes.

As they embrace this next chapter of their lives, the two say they’re thankful for the time on The Ultimatum, though they’re confident an engagement would’ve been in the cards regardless.

“I always knew I wanted to be with Vanessa, but I was there because she issued me the ultimatum. There were clearly some things that I had to figure out, and Vanessa too, but I was issued it, so I needed to go there, figure out why I was issued the ultimatum, figure out how I could improve,” he says. “We learned some things from the show that were super helpful, but we also learned some things that were helpful to avoid.”

“And when we had our reasons independently to leave, we both got out of that situation and became a much stronger couple,” he adds. “I’m still friends with some of the people [from the show] today … So I’m glad that we got on the show and went through this experience because at the very worst, we met some amazing lifetime friends, and now I have a lifetime love with Vanessa, so there’s a lot of positives that came after. It definitely worked out in the end.”

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Season 3 of The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On is now streaming in full on Netflix.