NEED TO KNOW
Suleika Jaouad may have manifested her relationship with Jon Batiste.
During an appearance on Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard on Wednesday, July 2, Jaouad, 37, opened up about the moment she realized Batiste, 38, was the one.
The journalist and author first met the We Are musician at band camp, and she recalled thinking she’d “never met anyone quite like him.” However, at the time, she thought she’d “never see him again.”
“Fast-forward four years later. It was my first weekend at Julliard and I was on the 1 train with my friend Michelle and we see this guy who’s like, attracting stares because he had headphones on and he was humming to himself and rocking around and playing the air piano,” she recalled. “Everyone was like, ‘Who is this crazy dude?'”
She continued, “So in that moment I was like, ‘Oh, I know that guy.’ I remembered him because he was so awkward and weird back then too. In the most delightful way. I was like, ‘That’s Jon Batiste from New Orleans.'”
Then, Jaouad “just blurted out: That’s the man I’m going to marry someday.”
In February, the couple marked their third wedding anniversary — and three years since Jaouad’s bone marrow transplant. That same month, they won two Grammy Awards for their documentary American Symphony.
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty
“The reality is, for most of us, our lives aren’t binary. Life isn’t either good or bad or happy or sad. It’s all of it unfolding simultaneously all at once,” Jaouad, who released The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life, told PEOPLE at the time. “So that notion of the idea of a wedding anniversary and a medical anniversary unfolding in the same week, to me feels like such an apt metaphor for what we all have to do all the time.”
In April 2022, Jaouad revealed their nuptials to CBS Sunday Morning — and said they wanted to tie the knot after she was diagnosed with leukemia for the second time.
“We got married the day before I was admitted to the hospital to undergo my bone marrow transplant,” she told the outlet.
“We have known that we wanted to get married, I think, from the first week that we started dating. That’s when Jon first brought up the topic of marriage to me. So, we’ve had eight years,” Jaouad said. “This is not, you know, a hasty decision!”
Still, she assured that her diagnosis was not a factor in his decision to pop the question.
“He said to me, ‘I just want to be very clear, I’m not proposing to you because of this diagnosis. It’s taken me a year to design your ring. So, just know this timing has nothing to do with it. But what I do want you to know is that this diagnosis doesn’t change anything. It just makes it all the clearer to me that I want to commit to this and for us to be together,'” Jaouad told CBS. “But once we realized we had this tiny window before the bone marrow transplant, we decided to go for it.”
The result was a “tiny” and “perfect” wedding.
“And I’ll tell you, we walked into that bone marrow transplant unit on cloud nine,” Jaouad added. “We were so happy, so brimming with love and positivity from this beautiful evening that we’d had. And I really believe that that carried us through.”
