Tiffany Woys Confronts the End of Her Engagement with 380 Save-the-Date Cards in Moving 'Took Back' Video (Exclusive)

Tiffany Woys was convinced she wasn’t meant to get married.

"I call it woman's intuition," Woys, 33, tells PEOPLE in an exclusive interview. "Something felt like, if this doesn't take place today, I don't know if it ever will."

It's this undeniable intuition that seemed to kick in for the first time in October 2022, when Hurricane Ian blew into Charleston, South Carolina and derailed the wedding plans of Woys and her then-fiancé Jeff. Miraculously, the wedding venue and countless of the couple’s cherished vendors were able to work together to reschedule the wedding to April of 2023. 

And while Woys was ecstatic, she says her fiancé was not. 

"I looked at him at the time and said, 'Isn't this incredible?'" she remembers of the crucial interaction with the man she had dated for over four years. "And his face looked like it wasn't incredible, and that was a really heart-sinking feeling. I remember he did say he thought we should just go to the courthouse. It was sort of like, 'If you really love me, you will do this.' And that felt very toxic to me."

Ultimately, six weeks before the couple’s rescheduled April 2023 wedding date, Woys found out that her fiancé no longer wanted to move forward as a couple.

"He is the one that chose to end the relationship," Woys recalls. "And the worst part of it was that he called this off in a text message. And he wasn't just calling it off. We were breaking up. How in the world can you go from getting down on one knee wanting to marry somebody that's the love of your life to thinking you should have never proposed to begin with?"

She draws in a deep breath.

"I'm not going to let anyone make me feel as low as I almost allowed him to make me feel," says Woys, whose 2022 song "I Don’t Want You Back" told the equally devastating story of her sister’s failed engagement. "He stole five years from me, a very valuable five years. I'm in my 30s now. I do hope that I am a wife and a mother one day. This is a part of my journey. This is a part of my dream."

But this dream was never going to come true with him.

"I felt like I bent over backwards for him, almost to the point where I just lost myself," Woys admits. "I was continuously filling his cup up and forgetting that I needed to refill mine. To be told at the end, 'Well, you're not going to make a good mother. You're not going to make a good wife.' You're not going to be all of these things… you can only take so much."

But while Woys went through hell in her personal life, the California native found a comfort in writing songs, including the heartbreaking song "Took Back," which she wrote alongside Tammi Kidd Hutton and Cameron Newby mere weeks after the breakup.

"I turned to music for healing," says Woys, who will release her new EP I’m Your Woman on May 31. "I don't think its talked about a lot in country music. You hear a lot about divorce, but you don't typically hear about a broken engagement, especially one that came to the depth that mine came to. I felt like there was no song that was going to be pitched to me that was going to be able to tell my story the way I can tell it myself."

And it's that excruciating story that plays out in the music video for "Took Back," premiering exclusively on PEOPLE.

"I had 380 people invited to this wedding, so I decided to surround myself in an empty room surrounded by 380 save the date cards around me to make you feel how many people were actually really involved," says Woys of the striking video directed by Robert Chavers — that also features 380 cancellation cards like the ones sent out last year. "We know at the end of the day, it's two people, but it was so much more than that."

And while Woys is now in a new relationship, she says she can’t deny that the memory of this past love still haunts her.

"It feels like a thousand knives stabbing me in the heart all of the time," she admits. "How can somebody who claims to have loved you so much do something so horrific, and then flip a switch on you and pretend like they have no idea who you are anymore? The only reasoning I can give you is that person never truly loved you. And that's a hard pill to swallow."

But at the same time, she feels grateful as to how everything has played out.

"I do believe this was a God thing," says Woys, being careful to add that she would never claim to be 'the perfect partner' "I really do believe that whatever was in the plan was already meant to happen. This was already written in our story. I just didn't know it yet."