March 2015: In a 2020 Instagram Live video, Ciara and Russell Wilson revealed that they met on March 26, 2015, when they attended a University of Wisconsin basketball game, according to BET. They talked a bit before Wilson asked Ciara to dinner around 9:30 p.m. He was hoping to meet her after another dinner he had planned with a group of business associates. But that time was a little too late for Ciara, so Wilson called his friends to push back on their plans. He and Ciara ended up going out that evening but they didn’t go to dinner. Instead they talked for hours, and other plans slipped Wilson’s mind. “I completely forgot about 10:30 [p.m.] dinner,” he said. “The next thing I knew, it was 12:00 [a.m.]at, 12:30 [a.m.]and I would sell you.”
April 2015: Ciara and Wilson looked as happy as could be in their first public appearance together at the White House Japanese state dinner.
July 2015: Wilson discussed their decision to remain celibate in an interview with Miles McPherson, pastor at The Rock Church. “She was in the dressing room getting ready to go before she went on stage, and she was sitting there, and God spoke to me and said, ‘I need you to lead her,'” Wilson said. “And I was like, ‘Really?’ And he was like, ‘No, I want you to direct her.’ So I said to her, ‘What would you do if we took all that extra stuff off the table and just like Jesus did?'” Wilson also mentioned the challenges of avoiding , joked, “I’m not going to lie. I need you all to pray for us. I know you’ve seen her on screen. If there’s a 10, she’s a 15.”
