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Everything We Know About Hoda Kotb’s Split From Joel Schiffman

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Hoda Kotb told her Today audience the wedding was off — and insisted nothing went wrong.

On January 31, 2022, Hoda Kotb used her own show, Today with Hoda & Jenna, to break news about her own life: she and fiancé Joel Schiffman had ended their engagement. The two had been together since 2013 and engaged since a beach vacation proposal in November 2019, but a wedding that was supposed to happen years ago never made it off the calendar. Kotb’s explanation to co-host Jenna Bush Hager was calm, deliberate, and notably free of scandal.

• Kotb announced on Today with Hoda & Jenna that she and financier Joel Schiffman had called off their engagement after eight years together, dating back to 2013.
• The couple got engaged in November 2019 during a beach vacation, but their wedding was postponed repeatedly through 2020 and 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Kotb said the decision followed “prayerful and meaningful conversations over the holidays” and that she and Schiffman plan to remain friends and co-parents to daughters Haley Joy and Hope Catherine.

The On-Air Announcement

Kotb didn’t wait for a tabloid to break the story. Viewers had already noticed she’d stopped wearing her engagement ring on air, and rather than let speculation build, she addressed it directly with Bush Hager sitting next to her. There was no dramatic reveal, no tears — just a straightforward explanation delivered the way Kotb tends to handle most things on camera, with warmth and control.

She was clear that the split wasn’t triggered by any single incident. “It’s not like something happened,” Kotb said, pushing back preemptively on the assumption that a breakup this public needs a villain or a scandal attached to it.

Eight Years, One Postponed Wedding

Kotb and Schiffman, a New York-based financier, had been a couple since 2013 and got engaged in November 2019 while on a beach trip — a moment Kotb had shared with obvious joy at the time. The plan was to marry in 2020. Then the pandemic hit, and like countless other couples, they pushed the date back. And back again. By the time 2022 arrived, the wedding had never actually happened, even as the relationship quietly continued.

That two-year holding pattern, it turns out, gave both of them time to reassess. Kotb framed the eventual decision as something that built gradually rather than something that broke suddenly.

“A Season, Not a Lifetime”

Asked to explain the “why,” Kotb reached for a line she said resonated with her:

“They say sometimes relationships are meant to be there for a reason, or a season or for a lifetime. And I feel like ours was meant to be there for a season.”

It’s the kind of framing that separates this from a typical celebrity breakup story — no leaked texts, no dueling statements, no camp warfare. Just two people, by Kotb’s account, arriving at the same conclusion after eight years and deciding to say so publicly rather than let rumors fill the gap. It’s a notably different tone than the drawn-out fallout fans have watched play out in other high-profile splits, like the messier read that followed Lisa Bonet and Jason Momoa’s divorce announcement.

Co-Parenting Haley Joy and Hope Catherine

The through-line in Kotb’s announcement wasn’t the end of the engagement — it was what stays intact. She and Schiffman adopted daughter Haley Joy in 2017 and daughter Hope Catherine in 2019, and Kotb was emphatic that neither the split nor the timing around it changes their approach to raising the girls together.

She described the plan going forward as building “our new path as loving parents to our adorable, delightful children, and as friends.” Unlike splits where the public spends months parsing hints for who left whom — the kind of slow-burn tension fans tracked in the lead-up to other celebrity separations — Kotb closed the loop on-air in one sitting and moved on with her broadcast.

Kotb didn’t take a day off the desk to process it. She delivered the news herself, on her own show, then kept co-hosting with Bush Hager the way she always has — which is about as clear a signal as she could send that this is a family adjusting its arrangement, not a career pausing to deal with a crisis.