This story is part of GQ’s Modern Lovers issue.
The first thing Russell Wilson and Ciara do together in the morning—right around 6 a.m., after one kid or another has chosen to wake them up—is pray. The prayer is always the same: They say thank you for the day. They set their intentions. They ask that the day be great. In football season, they do this in Seattle, where Wilson plays quarterback for the Seahawks and they have a house overlooking Lake Washington. In the off-season, it might be at their house in Los Angeles—if they have business there, which Ciara, now going on her second decade of pop stardom, often does—or at their house in San Diego (“our home away from home”), or if they’re looking for a little more fun, their house in Mexico. And you know what? Usually it’s a great day.
“It’s always a blast that we get to do love together,” Wilson says. He’s in his hyperbaric chamber, laid back on a pillow, the white tent around him gently wheezing and sighing. Yesterday the Seahawks narrowly beat the San Francisco 49ers, and so today is a recovery day. “I’m getting hit by 350-pound dudes,” Wilson says. The body can take only so much. The chamber helps. How does the chamber help? “It brings good oxygen to my cells and helps me recover faster. Science shows that it helps with recovery and healing, and so that’s why it’s such a big thing for me.” It’s weirdly intimate, seeing him occasionally lift an oxygen tube to his mouth and nose, the phone screen just inches away from his face. He has a couple of these chambers; this one is in Ciara’s office. She’s on the other side of the room, feeding their youngest son, Win, who was born in July of last year, and in this way they get to be near each other, even while separate.
Being near one another is always a priority. “We have some fun rules that we created,” Ciara says—rules about how long they are willing to be apart. “What is it, like 10 days that we don’t wanna push past, babe? Ten days when we travel?”
“When we first met,” Wilson answers, “it was 14 days.” That was in 2015. They got married in 2016. “Then it was 10 days. And now it’s no more than seven or five. I don’t know, it may be really five days at this point.”
“We laugh about it,” Ciara says, “because I’m like, ‘Babe, how many days?’ ”
During the season, Wilson is often on the road with the team, but at least his schedule is predictable. As for Ciara, well: “I could be called tomorrow to go and do a private for somebody’s wedding, and I’ve got to be able to rock and roll.”
Ciara, 35, has sold more than 20 million records since she began making music as a teenager; Wilson, 32, has won a Super Bowl, appeared in two, and has been selected for the Pro Bowl eight times. On one level, they have a marriage like anyone else’s, a blended family—Wilson helps raise Future, Ciara’s child from a previous relationship with the rapper of the same name—and together they nurture, as Wilson likes to put it, “an old-school love.” But there are differences. They have a staff of eight to ten: two full-time chefs, a physical therapist, a full-time massage guy, a trainer, childcare, assistants, security. They have, collectively, around 32 million Instagram followers (most of those followers are Ciara’s). They have lived, at times, in the tabloids, most notably during Ciara’s contentious split with the elder Future—a split so public and well documented that it ended up in a Jay-Z lyric. Wilson and Ciara have businesses together, fashion brands, fragrances, a charitable foundation, LLCs. People speculate about how they got what they got. They go on Twitter and give relationship advice based on Wilson and Ciara’s relationship: I don’t know who needs to hear this, but Ciara didn’t pray for a man, she prayed for herself. Wilson and Ciara are aware of the speculation, of the advice, and of what sometimes even seems to be envy; they are honored by it.
“It lets you know the feeling that people feel from you,” Ciara says. “It speaks for the power of love.”
They take the challenge of the perfection projected onto them by others and say: Okay. Sometimes they speak like the victorious teammates they are, giving postgame press conferences at the lectern of life. “We’re just grateful that we get to spend time together every day,” Wilson says. “Every morning we wake up together it’s a blessing, and we get to smile from ear to ear and know that ‘You know what? Let’s go. Let’s go do this.’ ”
“I feel like, if I could look back in a crystal ball when I was a little girl,” Ciara says, shaking her head in agreement, “and I looked at the idea of my family and what it would be for me, it’s exactly this.”
At weddings, someone inevitably gets up, holds out a Champagne glass, offers a toast, and says: Marriage takes work. Everyone nods sagely. But the reality is, most of us just muddle along. We are distracted by our jobs or our golf games or our Twitter accounts; we put in work like high school athletes, reaping modest glory when it happens to come our way, otherwise passing the time. Few of us turn pro, literally or metaphorically. Whatever it takes—to become a starting quarterback in the NFL, to become a multiplatinum artist, to bring that same manic drive and energy to building and maintaining a relationship—is beyond us. “People want to do it,” Wilson says, “but it takes a lot of responsibility to do it. Winning is a habit, you know? And nothing happens by accident.”
But Wilson and Ciara are dedicated to the habit of winning. They are willing to start over every day, to try and fail and try again, to make the thing between them work. “I think it was Thomas Edison, maybe, who talked about 10,000 light bulbs,” Wilson says. “That’s how many light bulbs it took to get to the right light bulb, you know? When you think about all that, how many times does it take to get to the right special moment, to get to that perfect place? If it was so easy to get to perfection, everybody would do it. That’s why you aspire to make the perfect light bulb.”
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But how does the relationship work, though? Exactly, I mean. “On an average day, we’re around each other pretty much the whole day,” Ciara says. When they aren’t, they generally FaceTime. Friday is date night. And if they have a big decision to make? “I really love letting him lead, as the man of the house.” Wilson drives. He plans the vacations to St. Barts.
“I’m a quarterback, so I like talking,” Wilson says. “I like talking about plays. I like, ‘Hey, what do you think about this idea? This strategy?’ ‘Hey, what do you think about this for the kids?’ Ciara, she’s an entertainer. She runs the show. She is the show. So for both of us, we have our beautiful flow of dialogue, constantly. And that could be all the way from our kids to, you know, the next business decision that we’re doing, to where we want to take our next trip to, you know, ‘Hey, what do you think about making a donation here or there?’ ”
Wilson says he thinks a lot about the “discipline of marriage”—“this idea of the discipline of communication. If I don’t communicate to my receiver, he doesn’t know what the play is. It’s like, ‘Uh, hey, what are we doing here?’ It’s probably more significant than that, even, but for us, for me and Ciara, communicating, it’s the same: ‘This week’s going to be a challenging week, babe, because I’ve got this responsibility. What about you? What do you have?’ And at the end of every week, we always go through a checklist of questions of, you know, ‘How’d I love you this week?’ ”
They are, Ciara says, “equally” ambitious. They go to parties and talk to everyone in the room. “I think the thing that we both do very similarly is we love networking,” Wilson says. “We love getting to know people.”
They are embedded not just in each other’s lives but in each other’s careers. He is her first listener. “One thing Russ has the ability to do is that he has a great perspective that would reflect most people—almost like a fan’s perspective, or an everyday person’s perspective,” Ciara says. Wilson is as dedicated to the project of Ciara’s greatness as he is his own. When Ciara decided to give up her major-label recording contract and launch her own company, Beauty Marks Entertainment, Wilson stayed up half the night with her, researching the history of people who have owned record labels. “I think Frank Sinatra was one of them,” Wilson remembers now. “Some amazing lists of people, you know?”
In so many ways, the two of them are tasked with finding domesticity in lives that are not particularly domestic: Are they able to find it? “I’m such a homebody,” Ciara says. “But I also was very blessed to travel the world.” She was a military brat, growing up, lived all over: Fort Hood; Germany; Monterey, California. Then she was a multiplatinum artist. Seattle is a long way, weather- and energy-wise, from Atlanta, where she first became famous. “There’s not near as much sunshine and a lot more rain,” Ciara says. But, she says, “just the raw, beautiful nature here is really beautiful. I’ve had way more lake experiences.” Paddleboarding, for instance. Also, “there’s a really cool boat culture here.” Ciara stops, tries to remember the name of the annual boat festival in Seattle.
“Babe, what is it called in the summer? Um, Seafair?”
And from deep in his oxygen chamber, Wilson responds, in the way husbands respond to their wives the world over, with a kind of weary, leave-me-out-of-it affection.
“Seafair,” he says. “Yeah.”
Wilson sets alerts on his phone when he’s not at home, reminders to send his children video messages. He says this project became even more urgent in the past year, as the summer brought reckoning after reckoning about the way Black folks are treated in this country. “It weighs heavy,” he says, “because you have these two beautiful kids at the time, and then another one in Ciara’s stomach here, about to pop out. And knowing that your three beautiful brown-skinned kids: It could be them.” He spoke about this at the ESPYs in June; he spent the football season warming up in a shirt that read “We Want Justice” and a helmet that said “Breonna Taylor.”
And “at least once a week, or every day sometimes,” he says, “and especially when I’m in the grind of being busy, I’ll send an inspirational video just to the kids. For example: ‘Hey,’ you know, ‘Future, be a leader. Be who you are.’ And Sienna: ‘Don’t forget you’re a queen.’ ”
To talk to the two of them is to get a sense, perhaps absent from other lives or partnerships, that love and marriage always move forward and that the present is always an improvement on the past. Wilson was married before; Ciara was engaged. Why get married again? Because everything is better now, is in their answer. The two of them are, as Ciara says, equally yoked. “Spiritually, first and foremost,” she says.
Wilson nods. “God is the center of it all for us,” he says. “And that’s a foundation for us. I think as we get to do everything together, business, life, kids, you know, parenthood, all that stuff, in every one of those categories the center of it is God and our faith.”
Their daughter, Sienna, was born in 2017; now they have Win too. “They’re all so close,” Wilson says. “They all like taking care of each other, so every day I come home from work and it’s late at night, it’s after film and practice and all that, and me and Ciara are together, and we just smile from ear to ear in the kitchen because we realize that our family is a beautiful blended family but it’s also, you know, our family. It’s us.”
When Ciara and Wilson first met, in 2015, Ciara was in the middle of what was reportedly an ugly custody battle with her former partner. The attention had grown so unrelenting that on Wilson and Ciara’s first date, the two were forced to drive around Los Angeles until they finally found a place, in the Georgian Hotel, uncrowded enough that they could sit and talk without being photographed. (Wilson went in ahead of Ciara and had them dim the lights.) This would be their first, and more or less last, moment of anonymity. When the two of them married, a little over a year later, Wilson instantly became one of the more famous stepfathers in the country.
“When I got to meet Future, he was young,” Wilson says of his then nine-month-old stepson. “And the reality was that for me it was a blessing and an opportunity to really hopefully be there for him every day and try to care for him in a way that was important for me, that I always wanted someone to do for me. Like my dad did for me. And so I think the greatest thing that I’ve ever learned in life is probably in that relationship with Future, because the reality of being a stepparent is that biologically they’re not necessarily yours, but the reality is that you have to love them as if they are. They’re your own blood in a way. You get to love them that way. And I think every kid deserves that and needs that and yearns for that.”
At the time, the elder Future made no secret of his displeasure at the arrangement. It was an early test of a couple who seemed to aspire to perfection, and they responded, basically, by ignoring it. Did Future’s public toxicity make things hard for them?
“I don’t think anybody made it hard,” Wilson says. “I think it was easy for us. I think it was about us. It wasn’t about anything else. It was about how we were going to love, and for me it was easy. It was easy to love. It’s easy to love C—every day I get to love her and take care of her and our kids is the greatest gift I have. So I cherish that every day.”
“And I will also say,” Ciara says, “from day one we’ve been living life for us. Russ—I mean, he did talk about, you know, how he feels and this passion from a father’s perspective, but what’s always been beautiful about Russ is just to see him from day one, excitingly jumping in and changing diapers.”
She says, “He’s obviously really beautiful to me in every way, but the father in him is by far one of the things that makes him the most sexy to me. Hot. To me it’s hot.”
In the second full week of January, the Seahawks lose unexpectedly to the Los Angeles Rams in the first round of the NFL playoffs, and a couple of days later Wilson and I speak again. On the computer screen he looks a little bleary, a little vulnerable: big muscles, weary sadness. “It’s unfortunate,” he says, rubbing the top of his head. “We had a great year, did a lot of good things, broke some cool records and stuff like that, but the whole point of doing it all is to win it all, so, you know—if you’re second, you’re last.”
What do you do, I wonder, when a life built around perfection and winning doesn’t yield perfection, doesn’t yield a win? “You have to be able to accept the challenges and the tough times, too, because it really catapults you to the best version of you,” Wilson says. “And I really, fundamentally believe that. I think that any great artist, or painter, or inventor, or leader, or creator, or anybody, it’s not usually the first attempt.”
Ciara says she once got a piece of advice from Wilson that has aided her ever since. It’s scripture—James 1: 2–4. “And it says, Consider it pure joy when you face trials and tribulations, for the testing of your faith produces perseverance.” She repeats the first part, as if to underline it: “Consider it pure joy when you face trials and tribulations. He told me that when I was in a really, really tough space. It was a tough time I was going through. And when he said that to me”—she repeats it one more time: Consider it pure joy when you face trials and tribulations of many kinds, for the testing of your faith produces perseverance—“to consider it pure joy in your lowest or your toughest moment, I just thought about that. For me a switch went off: What I’m going through is for a reason. Consider it pure joy. And I’ve been there before, where I’ve had to tap into faith. When I’m crying out and not knowing fully what the light looks like at the end of the tunnel, but believing in the light at the end of the tunnel. And it allowed me to smile after I cry. The trials that we face in life are really what build our integrity. It’s really what shapes us: Consider it pure joy. Because there’s got to be something great on the other side of this.”
You or I may search for answers, especially in this hard year that is now bleeding into a second hard year. We may wonder how to take care of ourselves, let alone others. But Wilson and Ciara have been waking up with a certainty all this time, and acting on that certainty each day. “The one thing that we did know, me and Ciara,” Wilson says, “the one thing that’s going to always get us through—not just us, but the world—at the center of all of that is love. And so for us, that’s all we focused on: love at the center of it all in our mindset. It was really, like, okay, with giving back: love at the center of it all. With our family: love at the center of it all. With society and the social injustices, and all of the things going on: Man, love is at the center of it all.”
It’s been a whole year—years, really—of thinking about that word: love. “Every day that I wake up, that’s always my priority,” Wilson says. “To show up and be there and to love.”
Zach Baron is GQ’s senior staff writer.
A version of this story originally appeared in the March 2021 issue with the title "The Perfect Couple."
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PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Micaiah Carter
Styled by Madeline Weeks
Hair by César Deleon Ramrez for crowdMGMT
Grooming by Mark Jacob Baysinger
Makeup by Yolonda Frederick-Thompson for crowdMGMT
Manicure by Yoko at Y’s Nail
Tailoring by Natalia Goebel
Set design by Annabella Kirby
Produced by House Creative Group
