Kelsea Ballerini on Matching Tattoos With Chase Stokes and His Working Relationship With Ex Madelyn Cline

Kelsea Ballerini and Chase Stokes‘ romance is so official, they have the ink to prove it!

The 30-year-old country music songstress is rolling out the details on their almost year-long relationship, including how they made things a little more permanent. 

“We have matching tattoos and we can’t break up,” Ballerini quips to Alex Cooper on the Call Her Daddy podcast. “We have matching Virgos …we got them together.”

Ballerini says that the decision to get the matching ink was something her and Stokes “kinda did” on a whim. However, it does have an important meaning to each of them. 

“I used to really resent my Virgo-ness because to me it was very control freak, just needing power in a lot of situations in a relationship,” she shares. “And he’s a Virgo too, and he and I have just really allowed ourselves to just love that part of ourselves and each other. Just the need to communicate well and be loyal and all those things.”

As the story goes, Ballerini DM’d the Outer Banks star at 1 a.m. during a drunk girls night out in Nashville, months after her divorce — another decision she didn’t think too hard about when it came to her and Stokes. 

“I was truly just so open and honestly when I DM’d him, did I think that I would be like, ‘Oh, this was going to be my guy?’ I don’t really know because I was drunk with my friends at a bar,” she says. “But when we started talking, I was like, ‘Oh, he’s lovely…’ and then as soon as we met I was like, ‘sh*t.'”

“I was really just enjoying that new season of my life,” she adds. 

Stokes brought the heat during their first official meeting, with Ballerini revealing he did something that was just “hot.” 

“I walked out to his car, and he got out of his Bronco … hot!” she says. “And he did not say a word to me and he grabbed my face and kissed me and he said, ‘Thank God you’re real.’ It was so redeeming for my experience of men in relationships and how sweet it is.”

Though she told Cooper she was single during her first appearance on the show last year, she admits she wasn’t. 

“‘Cause it was so new,” she says about playing coy about their relationship. “I had been on dates, but I hadn’t dated yet. It was so new and I was so nervous and it was fragile at the time, ’cause we were like, ‘We were like weeks into this…how are we feeling?'” 

Almost a year into their relationship — Jan. 7 to be exact — Ballerini admits she is “calm” and opens up about the best qualities about Stokes.

“My favorite thing …he got my windows tinted for me,” she says as she blushes. “I am so serious though, he’s been here during the strike and I went out of town to start working on the record and I got home and he was just like, ‘Yeah, you need to be safe .. I want you to be safe.'”

She adds, “He’s like the most emotionally intelligent man I’ve ever met in my life. I keep telling him he’s a man written by a woman ’cause he was raised by his mom, he’s very close to his sister and he’s just so in tune with his emotions. I think we both have come off of public breakups and we both didn’t want to waste each other’s time. But we’re both hopeless romantics, we’re both Virgos, the plan in us was like, ‘Are we vibing or no?'” 

The vibes are good and their time in the bedroom is even better. 

“I’m having a nice time,” the “Hole in the Bottle” singer shares. “I’m having a nice time. “I didn’t realize how it [sex] could be a real connector in a relationship. I never understood that. I always thought that was something that you did ’cause that’s who you did it with. Now I realize it’s a connector for people.”

As Stokes prepares to return to work on his hit Netflix drama, fans have speculated how things will go with the couple as he gets back to set with his ex-girlfriend and co-star, Madelyn Cline. 

Ballerni isn’t paying attention to the noise.

“I met her and I talked to her and she’s lovely,” she says about Cline. “And I think she’s wildly talented. I think the internet did its best to make it weird and it didn’t work for them. I’m stoked to be on set. At the end of the day, I’m a girls girl, I don’t buy into the bullsh*t. I think they have a beautiful working relationship. I don’t feel insecure about my relationship and I don’t feel insecure about myself. Everyone’s good.” 

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