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Alexis Ohanian couldn’t be more grateful for life’s unexpected moments.
The reddit co-founder posted a sweet message on Instagram this week in remembrance of the day he met his now-wife, Serena Williams . In his post, he revealed that he had returned to the pool at the Rome Cavalieri hotel in Italy on Friday, the spot where the couple first met. Right now, the pair are staying in Italy for the Italian Open, during which Williams played her 1,000th career match. She ultimately lost to Nadia Podoroska.
“Every morning here in Rome I’ve come back to where my life changed forever for a cup of coffee just like I did that fateful morning,” Ohanian wrote under a scenic photo. “Now there’s a spunky 3 year old with me who’s my everything. Life is unexpected & beautiful.”
The tennis superstar and the entrepreneur met in Rome on May 12, 2015, right before Serena was going to play her first match at that year’s Italian Open.
The pair told Vanity Fair about their first encounter, revealing that initially, Ohanian sat at a table Williams and her camp were planning on using for breakfast. Williams and her team reportedly attempted to get the Reddit co-founder to move by telling him there was a rat near the table, but the athlete ultimately invited her now-husband to join her.
In his post this week reminiscing about their first encounter, Ohanian referenced the fake rat, joking, “Still no rats here.”
“We were trying to get him to move and get out of there,” Serena told Vanity Fair about the encounter. “He kind of refuses and he looks at us. And he’s like, ‘Is there really a rat here?’ ” At which point Serena remembers the first words she ever said to him.
“No, we just don’t want you sitting there. We’re going to use that table.”
“I’m from Brooklyn. I see rats all the time,” he replied.
“Oh, you’re not afraid of rats?” she asked, to which Alexis gave a simple, “No.”
At the time of their first encounter, even though Ohanian knew who Serena Williams was, he wasn’t exactly a fan of tennis.
He knew generally about her accomplishments on the court, but had “never watched a match on television or in real life. It was literally the sport—even if ESPN was announcing tennis updates, I would just zone out. . . . I really had no respect for tennis.”
It seems like there’s more than one thing that has changed since that fateful day in 2015.