All About Joanna Gaines' Parents, Jerry and Nan Stevens

Jerry and Nan Stevens have been married for more than 50 years

Joanna Gaines has achieved massive success with her food and lifestyle brand, but she has always remained true to her roots.

The Fixer Upper star has been vocal about how much her parents, Jerry and Nan Stevens, mean to her, and through that, her fans have learned more about their own life stories as well.

While Jerry and Nan might not be in the spotlight like their daughter, they have always been there for her behind the scenes. Nan, who emigrated from South Korea, has inspired Joanna to be passionate in her own endeavors.

In a 2021 appearance on The Hoda Show, Joanna attributed her success to her mother, saying she was inspired by “how much she fought for the family.”

“Through the lens of all that she’s been through — the hardship, the fight — I think, for her, I think for both of us, it’s that thing of like, Mom, you set me up well,” she told host Hoda Kotb. “You set me up well because of the way you fought for this, your passion, now I get to kind of live in that wake.”

Here’s everything there is to know about Joanna Gaines’ parents, Jerry and Nan Stevens.

They have been married for more than 50 years

Joanna’s parents met in 1969. In a 2017 Instagram post celebrating their 45th anniversary, Joanna wrote, “My parents met in 1969 when my dad was stationed in Korea and their story is one you hear about in the movies. All the odds were against them but they fought through.”

In her book, The Magnolia Story, Joanna wrote that Jerry and Nan met at a party in Seoul, South Korea. Nan spotted Jerry sitting by himself and told a friend, “That’s the man I’m going to marry.”

In 2022, Nan appeared on Joanna’s podcast, The Stories We Tell with Joanna Gaines, and the pair discussed how she met her future husband. “You guys were at a party,” Joanna said, and her mom was coy about the details. “Oh, who cares, everybody knows,” Joanna continued. “She likes the Beatles — it was a pot party. It’s fine.”

Nan recalled that she and Jerry started spending time together after the party, until he had to leave the country. Two weeks before his departure, he told her, “I think I’m in love with you.” Jerry moved back to the U.S. and the two kept up a long-distance relationship.

Eventually, Jerry sent her a plane ticket and asked her to marry him. Even though their families didn’t initially approve, they got married in San Francisco during the summer of 1972.

They had a rocky start

While their initial meeting and love story sound like something out of a movie, it wasn’t always easy for Jerry and Nan. In The Magnolia Story, Joanna was candid about how much her parents fought at the beginning of their relationship.

“There were times, they say, when they didn’t think they would make it because all they did was fight,” Joanna wrote.

She later asked her mom about this time on The Stories We Tell. “The first year was rough because Dad was into drugs,” Joanna said, which Nan confirmed. Jerry told her they were “broke” and the pair dealt with backlash from their families.

However, after Jerry’s mother died, he began to view life differently, and things got better for the couple. “He envisioned himself in a casket, with his family surrounding him, and it hit him just how wrongly he was living his life,” Joanna wrote in The Magnolia Story. “He knew he didn’t want to end up in that casket the way he envisioned, leaving my mom alone to fend for herself.”

Nan is from South Korea

Jerry and Nan met in South Korea, where Nan was born and raised. In 2023, Joanna, her husband Chip Gaines and their family traveled to South Korea to visit the place where her mom lived and learn more about their heritage.

“For years, my mother has talked about taking her three daughters to Seoul, Korea when the cherry blossoms are in full bloom,” Joanna wrote in an Instagram post. “And for years, that’s all it was — a dream we’d talk about in that ‘maybe, someday’ way we all do when something feels just a little out of reach. But this year, we decided to finally book it, and we convinced 24 members of our family to come with us to visit the place where my mom grew up.”

In 2020, Joanna opened up about her background and how it inspired her children’s book The World Needs Who You Were Made to Be. “My Korean heritage is one of the things I’m most proud of,” she said in a press release. “The culture is just so beautiful.”

Chip and Joanna met at Jerry’s shop

Jerry and Nan eventually moved to Waco, Texas, and Jerry opened a tire shop. Joanna worked in the office, where she eventually ended up meeting Chip.

Chip had actually seen her photo before they met. “Her dad made the mistake of putting a picture of the family behind the counter at his shop,” he told PopSugar in 2018. “I knew I’d marry her one day just by the picture on the wall.”

The pair later met when Chip came in to get his brakes fixed. “We met in the waiting area and hit it off immediately. He was genuinely engaging, and he had such a sincere smile,” Joanna recalled.

Nan inspired Joanna’s love for her heritage

During an episode of her podcast, Joanna spoke to her mom about how hard it was to accept her heritage growing up.

“I don’t know that I ever told you this, but I always wanted to say I was sorry for living in halfness. And not fully embracing the most beautiful thing about myself, which was you,” she said.

Joanna recalled the time she visited New York City’s Koreatown during college. “I didn’t fully own who I was until that moment,” she said. “That I am this culture, this Korean history, this Korean story, my Korean mother, my Korean grandmother. That’s the richest part of who I am. And walking in the fullness of that really changed the narrative for me.”

Nan held onto her heritage by displaying Korean furniture and mementos in Joanna's childhood home in Rose Hill, Kansas.

"The formal living room was the room I was drawn to," Joanna said during an interview on the Ideas of Order podcast in January 2024. “Now I understand what it was and the meaning of that room for her. What my mom was trying to do was feel known and seen in this one space."

Joanna is always learning from them

Joanna is always taking in important lessons from her parents, as they are two people she looks up to. In a 2021 issue of Magnolia Journal, she told a meaningful story about her dad.

She recalled that a year and a half prior, her dad had asked her to stay and watch the sunset with him before their family went home. She was focused on getting her kids home and in bed, so she said no.

“It didn’t take me long to regret that moment,” she wrote. “My dad is the most understanding person when it comes to my family time. An invitation to stay and watch the sun disappear with him was a special request. I realized I’d held a meaningful moment hostage in the name of efficiency.”

Even though she wanted to reschedule their sunset date, she couldn’t — as the COVID-19 pandemic began soon after. Eventually, she and Jerry watched the sunset in his backyard while socially distanced, and she called the experience a “turning point” in her life.

“No longer would I measure my life based on what I achieved in a week, a day or an hour,” she wrote. “Now, it is time spent in moments like the one I shared with my dad that I hope define my lifetime. Time spent abandoning plans in order to catch a glimpse of something truly beautiful. … Time spent taking in the only view that really matters: the one unfolding right in front of me.”

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