Before the Malibu wedding, before the Christmas Day proposal on a New York rooftop, before any of it — Jordyn Woods and Karl-Anthony Towns were friends. Good friends, for years. If you want to understand why their marriage already looks unusually steady, Woods has been giving the same answer since 2023: “Friendship and trust.”
Friends First
The two had been close for years before they began dating in 2020. Then came the COVID pandemic, which Woods credits with giving the relationship its depth. “We were really good friends before we started dating, and COVID gave us that free time in our life to really get to know each other, because a lot of people don’t really get to know each other and they go into this relationship,” she told PEOPLE in November 2023. “So, we’ve been through a lot together. We’ve seen each other in all different ways, times, phases, so I think we have a very strong foundation.”
(TonyTheTiger / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0))The Christmas Day Proposal
Towns proposed on Christmas Day last year, and the couple announced it together — a joint Instagram post, “Marry Christmas,” with photos of the Knicks star down on one knee at Overstory, a rooftop bar in New York City, and a first look at Woods’ emerald-cut diamond engagement ring. A joint announcement, a pun for a caption, a holiday for a date: the proposal had the same unforced quality as the relationship itself — public, but on their terms.
The Wedding That Fit Them
The August wedding in Malibu scaled that intimacy up without losing it. Big guest list — Kylie Jenner and Timothée Chalamet, the Biebers, Teyana Taylor, Michael B. Jordan, Jada Pinkett Smith, Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor, plus Towns’ teammates — but a short, sweet ceremony, private vows, and two chairs of flowers for the parents who were missing: her father John Woods, lost in 2017, and his mother Jacqueline Cruz-Towns, lost in 2020, whom the couple honored quietly rather than ceremonially. Even the day’s single mishap — Woods’ custom veil briefly left behind at the Airbnb — became, in her retelling, proof of the couple’s temperament: she was, by all accounts, “the most chill bride they ever met.”
(cosmopolitanuk / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0))And Now, Patience as a Plan
Which brings us to Oct. 23, and Woods on Today with Jenna & Sheinelle, laughing her way through the baby question. “I am still not in the era of trying to get pregnant, so in a perfect world we will have family and kids. We love children,” she said. “It’s just I’m really focused on my career and hopefully the Knicks winning again that I don’t want to be pregnant for that.” It is the friendship-first philosophy applied to family planning: no timetable but their own, no chapter rushed because the audience is ready for it. Their relationship has moved at walking pace for six years — friends, then partners in 2020, engaged on Christmas Day, married in Malibu — and every step has landed. The next one will too, whenever they decide it is time.
(The White House / Wikimedia Commons (Public domain))Six Years at Walking Pace
Lay the timeline out and the pattern is unmistakable. Friends for years before anything romantic. Dating from 2020, with a pandemic handing them the one resource new couples never get — unstructured time to actually know each other. Still describing the relationship’s secret, three years in, as “friendship and trust.” Engaged on Christmas Day last year, in a joint announcement with a pun in the caption. Married this August in Malibu, calmly, with two chairs of flowers for the parents who were gone. And now, two months into marriage, declining to hurry the next step. Every era of this relationship has been allowed to finish before the next one began.
There is a professional symmetry to it, too. Towns’ career with the Knicks reached its summit in the same stretch of life — Woods’ hope that the team keeps “winning again” is the remark of a partner who has watched a championship run from the front row — while Woods has built her own name as a designer and model, a career she pointedly refuses to pause on anyone else’s timetable. Two people with demanding public jobs, moving through a very public romance at a deliberately private pace: it may be the most old-fashioned celebrity love story of the year, and it is working.
The Quote That Explains Them
If the relationship has a thesis statement, Woods delivered it back in November 2023, long before the ring: “Friendship and trust. We were really good friends before we started dating… we’ve been through a lot together. We’ve seen each other in all different ways, times, phases, so I think we have a very strong foundation.” Read it again after the wedding and it functions as a review of everything since — the rooftop proposal, the Malibu ceremony, the calm response to a missing veil, the unhurried answer about children. Couples often say the foundation matters. Woods and Towns have the receipts: years of it, built before the first date, and still load-bearing two months into marriage.
And so the couple enters married life with the league season ahead of Towns, a design career ahead of Woods, and a shared refusal to let the calendar be set by anyone else. Friends first, indeed — the rest, as they have demonstrated patiently for six years now, has a way of taking care of itself.