Brad Paisley has told the story of his proposal more than once, and his version is simple. He surprised Kimberly Williams, and the two of them were completely alone out at the end of a pier in Venice, Los Angeles. It was 2002, and the country singer had just asked the Father of the Bride star to marry him.
Kimberly’s version is the same story with one detail added, and she usually tells it with a laugh.
“He proposed right in front of the public toilets.”
Both versions are true. And the reason Brad Paisley chose that exact spot says a lot about the man who knelt there.
A safety net at the end of the pier
Years later, talking with People about how other country stars have staged big, public proposals, Brad Paisley described his own as the opposite. There was no crowd, no photographer, no plan to make a scene. He wanted the end of that pier because nobody could really see them.
Then he explained why that mattered to him. In his words, it was “a safety net — in case she took off running down the pier.”
It was a joke, but it was also an honest one. Here was a man who would go on to win Grammys and CMA Entertainer of the Year, and when it came to the biggest question of his life, he wanted to ask it where nobody could watch if the answer went wrong. The public restrooms nearby were simply part of the scenery he accepted in exchange for privacy.
She did not run. Kimberly Williams said yes.
Why it had to be that pier
Brad Paisley did not pick Venice at random. The pier already belonged to them.
Months before the proposal, the couple had walked out to the end of that same pier one night. According to accounts of their courtship, that was where Brad told Kimberly the two of them were meant to be in each other’s lives, and promised to always be there for her. It was the night the relationship turned serious.
So when he decided he wanted to marry her, he went back to the place where he had first said, out loud, that this was more than a few dates. Restrooms or not, it was the right spot.
The road to Venice started in a movie theater
The romance that led to that pier had begun a decade earlier, without Kimberly Williams knowing anything about it.
In December 1991, a 19-year-old Brad Paisley took a girlfriend to see Father of the Bride on their first date in West Virginia. Kimberly played Annie Banks, the bride. The relationship with that girlfriend did not last after Brad moved to Nashville, and a few years later he went back to the same theater, alone, to see the sequel on the anniversary of that first date, half hoping she might show up. She never did.
What stayed with him was the actress on the screen. When it came time to film the video for his 2001 single “I’m Gonna Miss Her,” Brad Paisley wanted Kimberly Williams in it.
He has said he reached out through her manager first and told the whole story. The manager passed along the message, and then gave Kimberly a warning that turned out to be right. As Brad tells it, the manager said he claimed to want her for the video, but “you’re going to date.”
They did. Their first date came in November 2001, after Brad finished taping a week of Hollywood Squares in Los Angeles. Kimberly has joked that for Brad it was love at first sight, while for her it took about a month or two.
What came after the proposal
The engagement on that Venice pier came only months after their first date. Less than a year later, on March 15, 2003, Brad Paisley and Kimberly Williams were married at the Stauffer Chapel on the campus of Pepperdine University in Malibu, California.
They have been together ever since. They raised two sons, William Huckleberry and Jasper, built a life in Tennessee, and co-founded The Store, a free grocery store in Nashville for families who need help. In March 2026, they marked 23 years of marriage.
A lot of celebrity engagements are designed to look perfect. This one was designed so that nobody would see it at all. All these years later, the detail people remember is the one Kimberly Williams-Paisley still laughs about: a nervous country singer, a ring, and a row of public restrooms on a pier in Venice.
Do you remember where you got engaged, and was it anywhere near as glamorous as you planned?