Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this column, we’ll be examining the celebrity couples that give us hope for our own romantic futures and trying to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds.
I can still remember buying my first Ashanti CD—specifically, her self-titled 2002 debut album—and playing “Foolish” over and over on a loop, promising myself fiercely with every fiber of my nine-year-old being that I would always be her fan. However, life is long, and eventually, my Ashanti CD would get lost in the shuffle (in addition to every other CD I used to own, except for the copy of Beyoncé’s “Flawless” that has been stuck in my car player for 10 years and remains there today). Imagine my surprise and joy, then, when I learned that not only is the aughts Def Jam queen engaged to Nelly, but the two are expecting their first child together.
Ashanti and Nelly first dated in 2003 and reunited a whopping 20 years later, with Ashanti informing the world of their newly rekindled relationship in perhaps the most iconic way possible; she had a clutch bag designed with her and Nelly’s faces on it, then she wore it to the Grammy Awards. Take a look at this mighty purse, which comes as loaded with relationship subtext as Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding Portrait, below:
For a couple that inspires limited-edition red-carpet accessories (a standard we should all be aspiring toward), Ashanti and Nelly have been pretty chill about announcing the new heights that their relationship has reached. “Yeah, we cool again,” Nelly said in an interview last fall, adding: “I think it surprised both of us, though. It wasn’t anything that…[was] planned. I think we’re both pretty much doing what we do.” For her part, Ashanti shared the news of her pregnancy on Instagram in an extremely charming way; in the video, her mom asks her how much time she needs to get ready for a performance, to which Ashanti responds, “Uh, I’m going to need about nine months.”
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Honestly, if I were writing a hip-hop rom-com, I would probably center it around a former industry ingenue getting engaged and pregnant for the first time at 43 alongside the formerly commitment-shy rapper she dated on and off in her 20s. Like…admit it, you’d watch that, wouldn’t you? Love and congratulations to the happy couple, and I wish their as-yet-unborn child a long and fruitful recording career. (I mean, if your parents are Ashanti and Nelly, you have to cut your first album in utero, right?)
