Ayesha Curry has it all: a Cooking Channel show, an upcoming food delivery service, and an adorable family with Warriors star Stephen Curry. But, her first encounters with her now-husband were not quite the stuff of fairytales.
In an exclusive interview with PEOPLE, Ayesha said she initially didn’t like Steph when she met him at their church youth group in North Carolina. Ayesha explains, “He was the cute boy at church that all of the girls were obsessed with, so I made a generalization that maybe he wasn’t for me.”
It wasn’t all lightning bolts and stars for Steph either. He jokes, “I don’t remember the exact first day I saw her. There was no wind blowing in her face with a backlight.”
Ayesha had a “no athletes” policy from the beginning. According to a piece of paper that her parents found from her high school theater class where she had to describe what she wanted in a significant other, Ayesha wrote “no athletes because they’re arrogant.”
It was sports, ironically, that brought Ayesha and Steph together. They reconnected in Los Angeles in 2008, where Ayesha was modeling and Stephen visited for the EPSYS. She turned him down at first, but finally agreed to go on a date with him. Breaking her “no athletes” rule, Ayesha said Steph was “so funny and silly” and “the absolute opposite of what I thought he was going to be.”
On their first date, Steph pulled out all the stops in order to impress Ayesha. After she picked him up in her ’95 Astro van, the two of them wandered around Hollywood Boulevard, sipped chai tea and took photos with Marilyn Monroe impersonators. Steph even went so far as to spend all the money in his wallet on a pair of Oakley sunglasses. All in the name of love.
They got married in 2011, and now have 2 daughters, Riley, 3, and Ryan, 1.
Ayesha and Steph may be a MVP of a couple, but their stories are just like the rest of us. It might just be time to ditch the “not my type” talk.
Read the full interview on People.com.
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