Last week, the world learned that Joy-Anna Duggar and Austin Forsyth are engaged.
While they’ll still be forced to forgo sex until their wedding night, some of the harsh restrictions placed on the couple’s courtship were lifted the moment Forsyth put a ring on it.
For example, Joy-Anna and Austin can hold hands now, which, in Duggar Land, is actually treated as a major step forward in the courting process.
But just because the young couple is now giving in to their wanton desire to press palms, that doesn’t mean they’re exempt from one of the more stifling strictures of courting:
Young Duggars are not permitted to spend time with their significant others without the presence of a chaperone, even after they’ve gotten engaged.
Interestingly, sources say the Duggars are doubling-down on c-ck-blocking security in Joy-Anna’s case, often forcing her to get to know her fiance under the supervision of not one, but two family chaperones.
According to The Daily Mail, when Austin proposed to Joy-Anna, both Johannah and Jennifer Duggar were brought along for the ride – literally.
The couple went horseback riding prior to Austin’s proposal, and we imagine the romantic mood was somewhat dampened by the presence of two of Joy-Anna’s many younger siblings.
Joy-Anna seemed to confirm the double-team chaperone treatment in a recent interview with TLC:
“We were going to go horseback riding and I decided to bring Johannah and Jennifer along because I knew that they would enjoy that, and they got to be the chaperones of this date,” Joy-Anna said.
She added:
“It also made this day really, really special and then he asked me to marry him and I said, ‘Yes!"”
It would be one thing if Jennifer and Johannah were simply chaperoning a date that ended in a surprise proposal.
(Don’t get us wrong; it would still be super weird.)
But the situation is made even stranger by the fact that that Austin asked for Jim Bob’s permission to propose.
Nothing in the Duggar family happens without Jim Bob’s say-so, which means the patriarch knew that Forsyth would be popping the question, but he felt the need to send two of her younger sisters to supervise anyway.
Of course, at this point the Duggars have set the weirdness bar so high that if that’s the strangest thing to come out about the family this week, they can consider it a victory.
On the bright side, the stringent rules don’t seem to be affecting Joy-Anna’s enthusiasm for her romantic future:
“I’m so excited to be engaged to my best friend,” she said, when asked about the proposal in a recent interview. ‘Austin made it so romantic, it’s amazing.”
Watch Counting On online to get caught up on this budding romance.