Ciara and Russell Wilson's Marriage Sounds Utterly Exhausting

Pop star Ciara and her husband, Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson, are the latest couple to appear on GQ’s Modern Love covers, following Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird and Naomi Osaka and Cordae. Of the three couples to put their love on display the week before a national holiday to celebrate love, Wilson and Ciara’s is without question the one that sounds most exhausting. The pair have been married for nearly five years, which may as well be five hundred years in celebrity time, and yet they still manage to be super hot for each other. Surely, that level of hotness and energy for a marriage should be attainable for mere mortals. But it turns out, it takes way too much fucking energy to be fully involved in a marriage at the same level as Wilson and Ciara.

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?’ ”

Now, we’re not going to talk about Wilson’s communication with his receiver because some of us (me) are still living in the aftermath of the absolute horror that was Super Bowl XLIX. But imagine being with a person who is this open and this consistent in communicating? All the time! Who has such a well-put-together schedule that they know their responsibilities for the week at the outset of that week? This is too much.

As a married person myself I can comprehend some of the work that goes into marriage because I guess I am doing it, but the “discipline of marriage” is a bridge too far and Russell Wilson knows it. He compares the labor of making his marriage work to Edison’s work on the lightbulb, saying it took about 1000 times to get the perfect one: “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?” But this level of dedication to everything in their lives is probably why they own a combined total of four homes, while the rest of us are fighting with our partners about how to optimize the space in a single corner of a one-bedroom apartment.

Read the full story of Ciara and Russell Wilson’s beautifully exhausting marriage at GQ.