Chase Stokes

Kelsea Ballerini has no regrets, especially where Chase Stokes is concerned. In her new cover story with Nylon, the country star opened up about how she slid into her now boyfriend’s DMs late last year, not long after divorcing songwriter Morgan Evans.
“I was at a bar in Nashville with some friends from Charleston, and they were like, ‘What about Chase?’” Ballerini recalled in the story published Tuesday (Oct. 24).

For context, Charleston is where Stokes shoots his hit Netflix show Outer Banks. After her friends suggested him, Ballerini followed the actor on Instagram — and he quickly followed her back. “I was just like, ‘Why am I waiting for this guy to reach out to me? This is 2022,’” she added.

The “This Feeling” singer ended up sending him a flirty message at 1:07 a.m., something she now laughs about. “Bro, I know,” she told the publication. “Listen, I was living my best life. I have no shame in that game.”

“I really did [know] as soon as I met him,” she continued. “And maybe that sounds like I’ve learned zero things, but I’ve always been a heart-first girl … and the truth is it’s never led me astray. I’ve always been where I needed to be while I needed to be there.”

“We are both very much so golden-retriever energy most of the time, but we both have a little bite in us, and we’re both incredibly driven,” Ballerini added of her beau. “He is the first person I’ve been in a relationship with that I feel like is not my complete opposite.”

As happy in love as Ballerini is now, the musician is still making sense of her tumultuous past couple of years, which have been marked by her publicly tense divorce from Evans. The pair was married for nearly five years before calling it quits in 2022, a breakup that inspired Ballerini’s heartbreaking EP Rolling Up the Welcome Mat.

According to her, the divorce made “a lot of conservative Karens very upset” and turned her into a target for social media comments about how she hadn’t tried hard enough to be a good wife. She told Nylon, “That scared me.”