This is the second part in a four-part series profiling four best friends – Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Serena Williams, Amal Clooney, and the Duchess of Sussex (the former Meghan Markle) – all of whom married at the same age, 36, long after they thought love had passed them by. Click here to see Part 1 about Priyanka Chopra Jonas.
It is May 2012. Serena Williams, by now, is already a legendary tennis player. Absolutely extraordinary. She’s already won 27 Grand Slams, and she’s only 30. Almost one Grand Slam for every year she’s been alive and breathing on this earth.
But, yet, she feels like a failure.
After high-profile romances with rappers Drake and Common, she’s single again. In a candid interview with Celebuzz, she makes a vow – she’s not dating for the next 10 years.
“I have given up on dating,” she said. “It just hasn’t worked out well for me. I’m a really emotional person. I give my all and everything. I do make mistakes – like every human does – but the last relationship was just too much of a heartbreak for me. I just can’t go through that anymore. It was hard. I just have to remove myself from that atmosphere for about the next decade or so. I can’t get involved.”
What’s that phrase? We as humans make plans in our hearts, and God laughs.
***
Even those that don’t follow sports as fanatically as I do know who Serena Williams is. She’s impossible to ignore. She’s the undisputed best female tennis player of the modern era. The Michael Jordan of tennis. To date, she has won 23 major singles titles – the most by any man or woman. She holds the most Grand Slam titles in singles, doubles, and mixed doubles combined among active players. She consistently ranks as the highest-paid female athlete year to year. She’s also an activist, particularly for black communities, along with her sister, fellow tennis superstar Venus Williams.
“Venus and I started out being successful, continued to be successful, and we were also unapologetically ourselves,” Serena told Allure. “We were not afraid to wear braids. We weren’t afraid to be black in tennis. And that was different.”
In describing the Williams sisters, The New York Times said in September that “they have refused to be anyone but themselves, insisted on playing in their own style and by their own rules. They paced themselves for the long haul and became well-rounded people – on and off the court. They attended college and developed their own businesses, rejecting the advice of experts to adopt a single-minded approach to athletics. They outlasted the accomplished cohort they started out with, players like Martina Hingis and Jennifer Capriati who took a more traditional, single-minded approach to tennis.”
She’s a legend in modern times, one many call the best athlete of her generation.
“If I were a man, then it wouldn’t be any sort of question,” Serena has said.
And, on top of all that, she’s a wonderful friend.
Serena met the then Meghan Markle at a Super Bowl party in 2010. They hit it off immediately, and Meghan described their first meeting like this on her now defunct blog The Tig: “Taking pictures, laughing through the flag football game we were both playing and chatting not about tennis or acting but about good, old-fashioned girly stuff.” She continued that she “quickly became a confidante I would text when I was traveling, the friend I would rally around for her tennis matches and the down-to-earth chick I was able to grab lunch with a couple of weeks ago in Toronto.”
Since then, the pair have supported one another relentlessly in both their professional work and charity work, Meghan famously flying across the Atlantic Ocean this past summer to catch Serena playing in the U.S. Open in New York. Meghan attending Serena’s matches is a tradition for them now – she’s supported her at Wimbledon for years, including this past summer as well.
“We have always supported each other, just been there for each other through a lot,” Serena said in 2017. After she flew for a one night only trip from London to New York just to see her play this past summer, Serena commented that “Meghan is amazing – she literally flew across the seas just to support for a few hours with a newborn baby. [Editor’s note: This quote was widely misconstrued that Meghan actually brought her newborn with her on the trip – she didn’t. Serena was saying that Meghan came to support her even though she had a new baby at home.] She is the most positive, amazing human that I know. Everyone needs to know how amazing she is. I don’t know if I could have done that with my daughter at that age. But she did it. And that shows the kind of person that she is.”
When Meghan was profiled in Vanity Fair in 2017 and it was becoming evident that she and Prince Harry might one day marry – and also evident that Meghan would have to carry the burden of the spotlight that comes along with that romance – Serena was quoted in the magazine as saying “Her personality just shines. I told her ‘You’ve got to be who you are, Meghan. You can’t hide.’”
When Harry and Meghan wed in May 2018, Serena was there and called the moment historic and something people would never forget. But, to her, it was more personal.
“I just wanted to see my friend be happy,” she said. “And I think that’s what happened.”
Flash forward to February 2019, and Serena and Meghan’s other close friend, Amal Clooney (who will be profiled next in this series in December), threw the Duchess of Sussex a baby shower in New York City with a hefty price tag of around $83,000 at the Mark Hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. As is customary these days for her, Meghan got a boatload of negative attention for the shower, saying it was too opulent and too lavish and not befitting of a member of the British Royal Family.
“Any time I see her name attached to anything, I don’t read it,” Serena said. “She couldn’t be a better friend to me. Low moments, high moments, she’s always there, and that’s all I want to be to her.”
Serena told Access Hollywood just this month that she “call[s] her, text[s] her anytime, crying, upset – she’s always there. Doesn’t matter what she’s going through, she just sets time away, and she’s so amazing.” One can expect, then, that when Serena made her very public profession that she was done with love in 2012 – that she wouldn’t even consider dating until 2022 – that Meghan was there for her then, as well. And she likely was one of the first phone calls Serena made to tell someone that, well, maybe she’d been wrong about that whole decade of singleness thing.
***
On May 12, 2015, Serena Williams was not looking for love. Obviously. She’d said as much on a very public stage three years prior.
“It [love] just hadn’t happened, and I really didn’t think about it much,” she told Allure. “I was so committed to my job, and to being the best and working the hardest, and I think I still am. Not to knock anyone else I was with before, because they were all mostly amazing, but I know now I can be selfish, have a great career, and a great partner, someone that believes in me.”
But before she knew that, she was just a girl in Rome, Italy trying to eat some breakfast. Serena, 33 in May 2015 and approaching her thirty-fourth birthday that September, was in Rome to play in the Italian Open and was staying at the Cavalieri Hotel. She and a group of friends were eating breakfast by the pool when a nerdy-looking guy sat down at the table next to them, a table they were saving for more members of their entourage that were expected to show up at any moment. Some guy Serena didn’t recognize – a guy named Alexis Ohanian – was the nerdy-looking guy who just so happened to choose the table next to them, of all the tables, to park and put his headphones on and work on his laptop. There were empty tables everywhere, and he chose the one right next to them, the one they were saving.
“This big guy [Alexis is 6’5’’] comes and he just plops down at the table next to us, and I’m like ‘Huh! All these tables and he’s sitting here?’” Serena told Vanity Fair. For Alexis’ part, he remembers the pool area as “not quite so empty.”
One of Serena’s friends, Zane Haupt, used his best attempt to get Alexis to leave.
“Aye, mate!” he said in his trademarked Australian accent. “There’s a rat. There’s a rat by your table. You don’t want to sit there.”
“We were trying to get him to move and get out of there,” Serena said. “He kind of refuses and looks at us. And he’s like ‘Is there really a rat here?’”
Then, Serena’s first words to the man that would become her husband, the love of her life, and the father of her child.
“No,” she told him. “We just don’t want you sitting there. We’re going to use that table.”
Ouch.
Probably feeling a bit guilty, Serena offered for Alexis to join them. Alexis was in town for a tech conference. Serena politely asked – having no idea who Alexis, who is the cofounder of Reddit (which is self-described as “the front page of the Internet,” a place where users interact and respond to many different topics of interest to them and currently valued around $4 billion), was – who he was here to see speak.
“Actually, I’m here to speak,” he said.
Serena had never heard of Reddit but pretended she did, saying she’d been on it just that morning, in fact. Alexis, for his part, had never watched Serena play tennis. But, after their completely chance meeting by the pool and their instant spark, Serena invited him to come watch her play that night. He knew so little about tennis that the first photo he shared publicly of Serena playing shows her committing a foot fault. They could not be more different. A total mismatch.
Yet…
***
The next month, in June 2015, Serena invited Alexis to see her play again, this time in the French Open. She hadn’t played well in the Italian Open, and she wanted to redeem herself. Come to Paris, she said. Alexis thought it was too good to be true. Serena Williams is asking me to come to Paris to watch her play? Yeah, right. But, loyal even then, he went to Paris.
He thought “Even if she blows me off and we don’t even hang out, I’m still going to have an amazing time in Paris, and I’ll have an even better story for all my childhood friends when I was like ‘Yeah, I went to Paris for a weekend. I was supposed to meet up with Serena Williams, she blew me off, but I’ve got other friends there, and we had a great time,’” he told Vanity Fair.
Before the tournament began, they walked around the city together – for six hours.
This is something, they thought. They knew.
Early in their relationship, a source told E! News that they had “never seen Serena this happy before with a man. It sounds cheesy, but it was love at first sight. They laugh nonstop and that really fuels their relationship.”
Alexis saw her play again at the U.S. Open that September, but they mostly kept their relationship private. By his thirty-third birthday on April 24, 2016 – nearly one year to the day after they met so randomly in Rome – Alexis knew he wanted to marry Serena.
“I felt like a door had been opened to a person who made me want to be my best self,” he told Vanity Fair. “I find myself just wanting to be better simply being around her because of the standard she holds.”
The wheels were set in motion. A proposal was imminent. And then, on December 10, 2016, Alexis took Serena back to the site of their fated first meeting – the Cavalieri – and took her to the same table by the pool they had first met at a year and a half prior. No one was there; the hotel staff, on Alexis’ instruction, had cleared everyone out. He retold their love story to her, how he had met her for the first time at this exact spot a year and a half earlier. On the table? A little plastic rat. Alexis dropped to one knee and proposed. The room they shared that night in the hotel was filled with flowers. It was the same room Serena had stayed in when they met.
Serena, in full circle fashion, announced their engagement – where else? – on Reddit. Alexis drew a customized version of Reddit’s alien logo, called Snoo, and she called herself the “future Mrs. Kn0thing” in honor of Alexis’ Reddit username, Kn0thing. She wrote, in the distinct style of Reddit: “I came home/A little late/Someone had a bag packed for me/And a carriage awaited/Destination: Rome/To escort me to my very own ‘charming’/Back to where our stars first collided/And now it was full circle/At the same table we first met by chance/This time he made it not by chance/But by choice/Down on one knee/He said 4 words/And/r/isaidyes.”
To this her future husband – the man she thought she’d never find – said “And you made me the happiest man on the planet.”
***
From there, the wedding plans began. November 16, 2017, was chosen as their wedding date, chosen to honor Alexis’ mother – November 16 was her birthday, and it felt right to honor her, since she couldn’t be there in person, as she had passed away nine years before.
“It is her birthday, and we wanted her to be represented at the wedding,” Serena said. “Obviously, we wish that she could be here for this, but choosing her birthday as our wedding date was a nice way of making sure she’s still involved and made us feel more connected to her on our day.”
But then – something unexpected. Something so beautifully unexpected.
In January, Serena took a pregnancy test. “I put it down. I went back to finishing hair and makeup, was laughing, talking. I was getting the styling done. An hour and a half later, I went back to the bathroom and I totally forgot about it because it was impossible for me…So I went back to get dressed and I went back in the bathroom and I was like ‘Oh yeah, that test,’” she told Vanity Fair.
It was positive.
“[I] did a double take and my heart dropped. Like literally it dropped,” she said. “Oh my God, this can’t be – I’ve got to play a tournament. How am I going to play the Australian Open? I had planned on winning Wimbledon this year.”
Never worry. At eight weeks pregnant, Serena won the Australian Open.
Then, on April 19, 2017, Serena posted a sideways photo of herself on Snapchat with the caption “20 weeks.” It was a photo she meant only for herself – posting it for the world to see was an accident, she later said. But, she owned it – later that evening, her spokesperson confirmed that she was, indeed, expecting.
During the birth of their daughter, Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr., on September 1, 2017, Serena nearly died from a pulmonary embolism during labor, and another pulmonary embolism after delivery, leaving her bedridden for six weeks. Yet, despite becoming a mother – enough of a stress on its own, without health complications – Alexis and Serena’s planned nuptials on November 16, 2017 still went on as planned. Held in New Orleans at the Contemporary Arts Center, guests included luminaries like Beyonce, Kim Kardashian West, Eva Longoria, and Anna Wintour. The wedding was inspired by Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, and Serena – who had turned 36 in September 2017 – wore a strapless, belted, caped princess gown by Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen and $3.5 million in jewelry while carrying a bouquet of white roses. At the ceremony, Alexis called Serena his queen and said they already have their princess – their daughter. According to Vanity Fair, he talked about how she takes such good care of everyone in her life, and how he now wanted to spend the rest of his life taking care of her.
“I will always have bad jokes that make your eyes roll, make you give me the side eye,” he said, to laughter from the crowd. “You are the greatest of all time, not just in sport. I’m talking about as a mother and as a wife. I am so excited to write so many more chapters of our fairytale together. And my whole life I didn’t even realize it, but I was waiting for this moment. And everything that I have done, everything that I am so proud of in my career, and in my life, for the last 34 years, pales in comparison to what we’re doing today. And I am so grateful, and I am so in love.”
***
When she was single, Oprah told her some advice: “Never let anyone dim your light.”
“That really stuck with me,” Serena told Allure. “Alexis doesn’t dim my light. He doesn’t try to dim my light. He puts me in the light, even if I don’t want to be. He pushes me to further points I never thought about. It always was something that I could see in some relationships – my light would be dimmer. Now I feel like I can shine really bright and still do everything that I want to do.”
Not only does Alexis not dim Serena’s light – he famously lets it shine for the world to see. Alexis is the king of grand gestures for his beloved, putting up billboards for her – who he calls the GMOAT (Greatest Mom of All Time) – to celebrate her first tournament after having their daughter. He also made a video showcasing her journey returning to tennis around the U.S. Open. One time, when she had a craving, he flew her to Venice, Italy to satisfy it.
Okay, yes, these gestures are grandiose and the type of thing only a billionaire tech cofounder could do for his partner. But, when it boils down, Alexis told Glamour, “it’s often the simpler things that are the most important. You have to show up. You have to be supportive. These are the things that matter.”
He continued “I know I’ve been successful in my career, but I’m not the one racking up the trophies. It helps that my wife and I both know what it takes to be successful and bring that mutual understanding, drive, and relentlessness to the table. But at the end of the day, sometimes her career really does have to come first. I try to be the most supportive partner I can be and to have conversations with her about her career goals and what she can do to reach them.”
When she was still single, Serena said “I think you have to love yourself before you fall in love. I’m still learning to love myself.” To do so, she took her now infamous vow of singleness for 10 years. But love, and life, had grander plans, and they looked absolutely nothing like what she thought they would, she told Essence.
“I’m an athlete, he’s a business guy,” she said. “I’m black. He’s white. We are totally opposite. I think we just complement each other. I think we understand hard work in different ways. Ultimately, I wanted to be with someone who treated me nice, someone who was able to laugh with me and someone who understood my life and someone that loved me…and you know, I’m sure there are other people out there. But you know, Alexis is the one I connected with, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Sometimes we ward off love – thinking it is too painful and too risky – but, in the end, as Alexis and Serena have proven through their completely chance meeting and unlikely attraction to one another, love finds us anyway, always at the right place, always at the right time, always with the right person in the end.
The next “And the bride was 36” installment will drop in December and will feature the incomparable love story of George and Amal Clooney.
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