I first we met in Rome, our first date was in Paris. So, you met in Italy >> Yeah. and had your first date in Paris. Yeah. I’m a hopeless romantic, too. A deal breaker for me in a relationship is definitely loyalty. Well, not having it, that is. Fans are now extremely worried about the state of Serena Williams’ marriage, and the signs have been piling up for over a year.
From the missing wedding ring and the social media silence that lasted months thing for a long time because we were just, you know, just texting and I was asking questions and it was that. And so, that was >> Was there a there there? >> to cryptic posts about walking away from people who rob you of your joy.
This is the full timeline of what’s been happening between Serena and Alexis Ohanian, and why nobody knows what to believe anymore. So, let’s get into it. The whole thing started with a table by a hotel pool in Rome. It was May 2015. Serena Williams was in town for the Italian Open, focused on adding another trophy to a career that already included 19 Grand Slam titles at that point.
Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, was there for the Festival of Media Global Conference, an event that had absolutely nothing to do with tennis. Their worlds could not have been further apart. It was at the hotel we were staying at, and I was in Italy, and this guy shows up, and the whole place is empty.
And this guy, like, really tall Serena wanted to sit at a specific table by the pool, and when she got there, Alexis was already sitting in it. She wasn’t the type to back down from anything, on or off the court, so she made it clear she wanted the spot. He comes with his computer, and he like plops down right next to us, and he opens his computer, and he starts typing.
What followed was a playful back and forth between two people who had no idea they were about to fall in love. The small argument turned into a conversation, and the conversation turned into curiosity. After that first meeting, Serena invited Alexis to meet her in Paris. He wasn’t sure if she was serious, but he figured even if she didn’t show up, he would still have a great time in Paris and a solid story to tell his friends.
She did show up, and the trip wasn’t casual. It was the beginning of something real. And I’m just like, “Why?” I was so angry. I was like, “Why is this guy here?” And so, we tried to get rid of him. By September 2015, the relationship had grown serious enough that Alexis was showing up at Serena’s US Open matches, cheering from the stands in full view of the cameras.
He wasn’t hiding it. He was proud. He posted about her on Instagram and made it clear that he understood exactly who he was dating. The two of them found common ground through their sense of humor, their mutual respect for each other’s careers, and a shared love of Marvel movies and Iron Man that Serena later said was the thing that really won her over during their first dinner together.
That dinner, by the way, wasn’t exactly romantic. Serena’s agent and assistant were both at the table, and Alexis spent 2 hours being interrogated about his life, his intentions, and whether he had any kids or previous marriages. It felt more like a job interview than a date, but he passed the test, and the rest is history.
In December 2016, Alexis flew Serena back to Rome. Not just any spot in Rome, but the exact same hotel where they had fought over that poolside table a year and a half earlier. He took her back to that same table, got down on one knee, and proposed. The symbolism was perfect. Their story started at that table, and now a new chapter was beginning in the same place.
Serena announced the engagement on Reddit, which was a nod to Alexis’ world. She wrote a short poetic post about how the proposal went down, and the internet went crazy. It was one of those celebrity moments that actually felt genuine, not staged for cameras or designed for a press cycle. Two people who met by accident in a foreign country were now planning to spend the rest of their lives together.
Good story. Wedding bells for Serena Williams. The tennis star is engaged to Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, making the big announcement on the social news site. The Grand Slam athlete shared a poem detailing how she said yes to the proposal. Then in April 2017, Serena accidentally revealed an even bigger surprise.
She posted a Snapchat showing her baby bump with the caption, “20 weeks,” and then quickly deleted it. But it was too late. Screenshots spread instantly, and within hours the entire world knew that Serena Williams was pregnant. She later confirmed the news on Instagram with a letter to her unborn child, describing the strength and peace the baby had already brought into her life.
What made the pregnancy even more staggering was the timeline. Serena had won the Australian Open in January 2017, meaning she was roughly 8 weeks pregnant when she claimed that Grand Slam title. She beat her sister Venus in the final while carrying a child. That detail alone elevated her from legendary athlete to something closer to superhuman.
On September 1st, 2017, Serena and Alexis welcomed their daughter, Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr. Alexis posted a message calling the baby “Mama’s perfect sidekick,” and the whole world celebrated with them. Just 2 months later, on November 16th, 2017, they got married in New Orleans at the Contemporary Art Center.
The guest list included Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Kim Kardashian, and a room full of people who understood they were witnessing the union of two very different worlds coming together in a city known for celebration. In January 2018, Serena and baby Olympia appeared on the cover of Vogue, making Olympia the youngest person ever featured on the magazine at just 3 months old.
6 years later, in August 2023, the couple would welcome their second daughter, Adira River Ohanian. The family was growing, the love was public, and nobody had any reason to question what Serena and Alexis had built. What made Serena and Alexis work as a couple was never about how similar they were.
It was about how differently they moved through the world and how much respect they had for each other’s lanes. Alexis never tried to compete with Serena’s fame. He leaned into it. When fans on social media called him “Serena Williams’ husband,” he didn’t push back. He joked that even if he became a billionaire, people would still know him primarily as Serena’s husband and Olympia’s dad, and he was completely fine with that.
Serena, for her part, was honest about the fact that marriage was not a fairy tale. During a Q&A for Bumble, she was asked what surprised her the most about being married, and her response was straightforward. Marriage is not bliss, but it can be if you work at it. She also talked about how rare and valuable it is to find real love and how much she valued what she and Alexis had built together.
Balancing two massive careers with parenthood was the constant challenge. Alexis admitted in interviews that he struggled to find the right balance between work and family, and that Serena was better at knowing when to shut everything off and be present for their daughter. He said he was learning from her how to disconnect from the noise and focus on what actually mattered.
Throughout Serena’s final years on the tennis circuit, Alexis was her loudest supporter. He showed up to matches, posted about her on Instagram, and made it clear that in his eyes, she was always the queen of the court. When she had to withdraw from Wimbledon in 2021 because of a leg injury, he was right there beside her.
At the Met Gala that same year, they turned heads with their looks, and Alexis posted a black and white photo of them sharing a kiss, calling it a rare date night. They attended Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s wedding together in 2018. They celebrated anniversaries with sweet posts.
They took their daughter everywhere and shared family moments that made people believe they had figured out the formula. And for a long time, it looked like they had. Love is an amazing feeling, and if you have an opportunity to feel it, then you it’s a special thing. The first signs that something might be off appeared in mid-2024. Fans who had followed Serena and Alexis for years noticed that the couple had stopped appearing together on social media.
The last photo Serena posted featuring Alexis was from August 2023. After that, nothing. For almost a year, Serena’s Instagram was full of photos with her sisters, Venus and Lyndrea, her mother, Oracene, and her daughters. She was traveling through Europe, attending Gucci fashion shows, and hitting red carpets. But Alexis was nowhere in any of the pictures.
Then people noticed the wedding ring, or rather, the absence of it. In photo after photo, Serena’s left hand was bare. For a woman who had been proudly married for nearly 7 years and had always worn her ring in public, the missing band set off alarms across the internet. It wasn’t just one photo, either. It was a pattern.
Event after event, red carpet after red carpet, the ring was gone. Father’s Day 2024 made things worse. Serena, who was known for posting about the important people in her life on every occasion, said nothing about Alexis. No tribute, no photo, no caption, nothing. For a couple that had built their public image on open displays of love and admiration, the silence felt deliberate.
Fans started combing through both of their accounts and discovered that Serena wasn’t even following Alexis on Instagram anymore. Old photos of the two of them together had reportedly been scrubbed from her page. The evidence was all circumstantial, but it was piling up faster than either of them could ignore.
On Alexis’s side, things were different, but also strange. He was still posting about his life, his business, and his role as a father. But Serena was missing from his feed, too. The man who once posted love letters and crown emojis for his wife was suddenly only sharing content about himself and the kids. Neither of them addressed the speculation directly, and the silence itself became the loudest part of the conversation.
On July 5th, 2024, right when the divorce rumors were reaching a fever pitch, Alexis posted something that made the entire internet stop and recalculate. It was a photo of him and Serena having dinner together. She was smiling and leaning toward him. He was sitting beside her, relaxed, with his left hand positioned so that his wedding ring was clearly visible.
The caption was two letters, GM. Good morning. Nothing else. The photo sent fans into two camps immediately. One side took it as proof that everything was fine and that the rumors had been overblown. People commented things about love being real and this being shade thrown directly at the gossip. One commenter wrote that the ring placement alone told them everything they needed to know.
The other side wasn’t convinced at all. Some pointed out that the photo could have been old. Others noted that one dinner selfie didn’t explain months of social media absence, a missing wedding ring in dozens of other photos, and zero public interaction between the two of them for nearly a year. A few people even said they went to Serena’s page and confirmed she still wasn’t following him.
Days later, the couple was both in France. Alexis was at the Cannes Lions Festival for a business appearance, and Serena was doing Paris Fashion Week. They were in the same country at the same time, but they appeared at their events separately. At the 2024 Paris Olympics, they were spotted together, but a Eurosport correspondent made the mistake of referring to Alexis as Serena’s umbrella holder, which he responded to with humor, saying he was also Olympia’s personal umbrella holder.
In November 2024, the couple appeared together in a promotional video for a glucose monitoring brand, answering questions about their relationship and testing each other’s memories. The video showed them laughing, eating together, and recalling who said, “I love you first.” I had some gelato, my glucose is too high.
Next thing I know, I’m calling this guy and I’m like saying things I wouldn’t normally say. I love you. It felt natural and warm. Both of them also posted separate anniversary tributes for their seventh wedding anniversary. Serena thanked him for being the best dad to their girls. Alexis shared a family photo from their anniversary trip.
But even after all of that, some fans still weren’t convinced, and the comment sections remained split. If the social media silence was the first wave of speculation, Serena’s cryptic posts were the second. In October 2024, she posted on X that if someone close to you is robbing you of your joy, it’s okay to walk away. She didn’t name anyone.
She didn’t provide context. She just put the words out there and let the internet do what the internet does. People immediately assumed she was talking about Alexis. Others argued she could have been talking about anyone or anything, a friend, a business partner, even the pressure of public life. But the timing made it impossible to separate the post from the marriage rumors.
Then, in November 2025, weeks after they had quietly celebrated their eighth anniversary, Serena posted another message that raised eyebrows. She wrote that love shows up and that if someone loves you, they show it in many different ways. Again, no names. Again, no context. And again, the internet split down the middle between people who thought she was subtly addressing problems in her marriage and people who thought fans were reading too far into motivational quotes.
Alexis, meanwhile, continued to show up for his family in public ways that made the divorce narrative harder to sustain. In February 2025, when Stephen A. Smith criticized Serena for her cameo appearance during Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime performance, which many interpreted as a jab at her ex, Drake, Alexis fired back.
He confronted Stephen A. on a First Take appearance, essentially telling an unmarried man to stay out of his married family’s business. He posted on X that Armenian men are a little extreme when it comes to family. The message was clear. He wasn’t going anywhere. But the internet doesn’t forget easily. As recently as March 2025, when Serena posted a video of Alexis photo-bombing a picture with her mother, fans analyzed every frame.
Some thought it was adorable. Others noticed that Serena grabbed Alexis’s hand and placed it on her hip, suggesting the affection wasn’t organic, but staged. The scrutiny on this marriage has reached a level where every gesture, every caption, and every missing photo is treated as evidence in a case that has no defendant and no verdict.
As of 2026, Serena Williams and Alexis Ohanian are still married. There has been no divorce filing. There has been no official statement confirming trouble. They continue to co-parent their two daughters, Olympia and Adira, and they show up together at events from time to time. On paper, the marriage is intact, but the pattern that started in 2024 has never fully gone away.
The long stretches of social media silence between them still happen. The wedding ring appears and disappears from photo to photo. The cryptic posts about joy and walking away still pop up without explanation. And neither Serena nor Alexis has ever directly addressed the speculation, which means every fan, every commentator, and every gossip outlet is left to interpret the silence however they want.
What makes this whole situation so unusual is that Serena and Alexis were never a couple who hid their relationship. From the moment they started dating, they posted about each other constantly. He called her the queen. She called him her partner. They shared everything from red carpet moments to grocery runs.
The openness was part of their brand as a couple, so when that openness dried up almost overnight with no explanation, people noticed. And they haven’t stopped noticing. The second daughter, Adira River Ohanian, was born in August 2023. That means the social media shift happened almost immediately after the family expanded from three to four.
Whether the timing is coincidental or connected is something only Serena and Alexis know. But the fact that their most public period of distance began right around the arrival of their second child has not gone unnoticed by fans who have been tracking every detail. Serena herself once said that marriage is not bliss, but it can be if you work at it.
That sentence has aged differently with each passing month. Depending on which photos you look at, which posts you read, and which version of the story you believe, those words are either a healthy acknowledgement that relationships take effort, or a quiet admission that the effort hasn’t been enough. The only people who know the truth are the two people who met over a poolside table in Rome and built a family from that moment forward.
And they’re not talking. Anyway, that’s it for this video, folks. Bye.
