Serena Williams and Alexis Ohanian make up one of the world’s top celebrity couples to watch. These lovebirds are not only at the top of their careers, but they are also totally smitten and share a beautiful family together. In September 2017, they welcomed daughter Alexis Olympia, before tying the knot that November. While these two are undoubtedly couple goals, there’s more to their seemingly perfect power couple than meets the eye.
Here are some of the strange things about Serena Williams and Alexis Ohanian’s marriage.
An awkward meet-cute
“We were trying to get him to move and get out of there,” Williams told Vanity Fair in 2017. The group mistook his close proximity as an attempt to get too close to her, so they told him that there was a rat by his table. “He kind of refuses and he looks at us,” Williams recalled. “And he’s like, ‘Is there really a rat here?” He added, “I’m from Brooklyn. I see rats all the time.”
Dating in secret
Williams and Ohanian were initially notoriously private about their blossoming romance. The couple secretly dated for nearly 15 months before they finally went public with their engagement announcement in December 2016.
Shocking pregnancy reveals
In April 2017, Williams accidentally revealed her first pregnancy when she infamously shared (and deleted) a Snapchat selfie. While showing off her baby bump in the photo, she wrote, “20 weeks.” Fans may have been stunned, but the newly engaged pair couldn’t have been more shocked themselves when they found out they were expecting.
They didn’t know each other’s work: Williams and Ohanian may be at the top of their respective fields, but they were totally clueless about one another’s careers when they first met.
As Ohanian told Vanity Fair, he was about “98 percent sure” he was speaking to the Serena Williams during their first conversation, though he wasn’t interested at all in tennis. “[I had] never watched a match on television or in real life,” he said. “It was literally the sport — even if ESPN was announcing tennis updates, I would just zone out … I really had no respect for tennis.”
Battling health complications together: When the couple welcomed its first child, Alexis Olympia, in September 2017, Williams suffered scary postpartum health complications.
As she revealed to Vogue the following January, her plummeting heart rate during contractions led to an emergency C-section, after which Ohanian cut the cord and placed their little girl on her chest. “That was an amazing feeling,” she said. “And then everything went bad.”
Relationship goals
Serena Williams and Alexis Ohanian’s relationship may have its fair share of quirks, but at the end of the day, these two are clearly total #RelationshipGoals. The married pair is known to share their funniest, cutest, and most romantic moments on social media.
Some of our faves include the couple having fun with flower filters, busting out dance moves with New Edition, smiling big in their first official family portrait, and sharing an intimate moment on their wedding day.
