• Morgan Myles got engaged to her boyfriend Taylor Place on July 14 at her home in Nashville
• Before the proposal, the country singer’s parents frightened her so much that she thought something terrible had happened
• Myles remembers the moment she knew Place was the right one

Morgan Myles has found eternity with Taylor Place.

The country singer revealed exclusively to PEOPLE that she is engaged to boyfriend Place after he got down on one knee at her Nashville home on July 14. When Myles reflects on the events that led to their engagement that day, she openly describes the chaos that followed as “hysterical.”

In the days before, Myles had been working long hours in a recording studio in Los Angeles and was planning to fly back that morning for what her parents had led her to believe was a surprise party for a family friend. When she landed, her mother urged her to wear the “blue dress” she had bought her – but she was too exhausted from the flight to think anything of it.

“On the way, we’re about 10 minutes from the house, my mom says, ‘Oh my God. Our next door neighbor said the police are at the house.’ So I immediately thought I had experienced the worst because I was doing my laundry and there’s an older dryer upstairs and I thought I had set the house on fire,” said Myles, who appeared in season 22 of The voicesays PEOPLE.

The “Whiskey Dreaming” singer continues: “So my dad is driving back to the house more and more recklessly. And I’m like, ‘Is the fire department here?’ My dog ​​is my everything. And I’m thinking: Teddy is locked in the house. I’m really, really scared.”

When she got home, Myles immediately ran inside to make sure everything was okay. Then her mother said, “Morgan, you better take a look at this…” which made Myles panic even more.

“I see Taylor in the backyard with flowers in her hand and I’m like, ‘What the hell?’ I just can’t process it. I’m so overwhelmed. My heart is racing. We get back there and my two friends were obviously helping, it was hysterical,” she recalls.

“I hear Celine Dion turning the volume up loud,” she adds. “The only thing I hear from Taylor is, ‘Do you want to…’ I maintain that he didn’t say anything. He gets down on his knees and I say, ‘Wait.’ I couldn’t process that. So I said, ‘Wait, aren’t we going to the birthday party?’ And he says, ‘Honey, you have to say yes. You have to give me an answer.’ I say, ‘Well, of course.'”

She concludes: “What a shitshow on my part. (But) it was really sweet.”

Despite the shock factor, Myles knew an engagement to Place was fast approaching: “A big reason he proposed to me sooner than I thought was because he can’t even keep secrets for his entire life, and I think that’s great. I mean, you marry a man who can’t hide anything from you.”

The “Mad at Myself” singer and Place were introduced to each other by a mutual friend in December 2023. At the time, she didn’t want to get her hopes up because she had “been through so much in terms of relationships and been broken so many times.”

“I got to a point where I knew I couldn’t settle for anyone. There were just too many situations in my life where I knew I would rather be happy alone. I think I had come to a place of true self-love,” she says. “But there was a certain level of loneliness that I think I was in denial about because I was always the girl who knew she wanted a family. I remember crying to my mom several times and saying, ‘Why is this so hard? Is it because of me? What’s going on?'”

After they met, they hit it off right away and she realized that she had never “found someone who was so on my wavelength and had such a good heart.”

Weeks later, Place – a construction contractor – called Myles’ grandmother on FaceTime while she was in hospice. After the call, her grandmother looked at her and said, “Don’t screw this up.”

“You can’t show someone how to be there for them. God gives you situations like this to show you who others really are. When he came to the funeral, he met most of my family for the first time. He already knew my parents, but he had to meet my whole family at a very vulnerable moment,” she says.

At that moment, Myles knew she was in love.

“I always had to be alone. And that was the first funeral where he said, ‘If you allow me to come, I want to be there for you because that’s your job.’ And I said, ‘You’re the first person who’s ever said that.'”

Now her place feels like home.

“Everything else in the world just doesn’t matter when we’re together. No matter how stressed or busy we are or whatever is going on, there’s this warmth and a feeling of home without being home,” she says. “It’s a very hard feeling to describe, but it’s very real. I know this man isn’t going to hurt me. I can see into the future.”

Myles and Place have set a wedding date for October 2025, and he plans to move to Nashville with Myles. She also released a single on Tuesday, August 27 – the first release from her upcoming album – titled “That’s What You Get with Me,” which she wrote to “manifest” the type of man she wanted to be with before meeting Place.

“It was that moment where I was very vulnerable and ready and I was like, ‘This is what you get with me. I’m not perfect. But man, my heart is bigger than you can imagine and it will always love you.'”