“She stalked me,” Alyssa Thomas, a forward for the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun, jokes about her fiancée and Sun colleague, DeWanna Bonner. The 2 females were not yet colleagues when Bonner, then on the Phoenix Mercury, moved into Thomas’s DMs.
It would be almost a year of friendly texts and FaceTime calls before fate brought Bonner to Connecticut to sign up with the Sun. And while Bonner might have made the very first relocation online when it concerned starting a relationship, it was Thomas who led on taking things from platonic to romantic.
“The elevator opened and she saw me and it resembled, ‘Ahhhh,'” Bonner teases back, mimicing the “choir of angels” noise that plays when something stunning or desired is displayed in an animation. From that day 4 years back, the 2 have actually been inseparable, revealing their engagement in July 2023. “We’re together, forget 24/7,” Bonner informs SELF. “It’s 24/9.”
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In a great deal of offices, there are guidelines versus dating a colleague. In the world of elite and expert females’s sports, it’s not an irregular incident for 2 colleagues to be romantically included.
Better Halves Allie Quigley and Courtney Vandersloot won a WNBA champion together with the Chicago Sky in 2021. Mercury gamer Diana Taurasi fulfilled her partner Penny Taylor when they were colleagues in Phoenix. WNBA gamers Breanna Stewart and Candace Parker fulfilled their other halves (Marta Xargay and Anna Petrakova, respectively) when they were playing basketball overseas throughout the W’s off-season. PWHL Montreal and Team Canada gamers Marie-Philip Poulin and Laura Stacey, who are engaged, approved the brand-new Professional Women’s Hockey League its own variation of the ladies’s soccer “they’re lesbians, Stacey” meme: “She’s gay, Marcus.” And believe me– I can inform you as somebody who has actually been reporting on ladies’s sports for almost a years– for each relationship the general public learns about, there are lots of connections and separations that never ever leave the locker space.
Women’s sports tend to be greatly queer, and it’s a running joke within lesbian neighborhoods that there are a great deal of connections, breaks up, and pair-ups within buddy groups– so it makes good sense that their locker space culture would show sapphic culture at-large. Not just that, however expert athletes invest a great deal of time with their colleagues and frequently do not have a lots of downtime, that makes it more difficult to fulfill individuals. They currently share a typical interest in their shared sport, so it’s just natural that colleagues would gravitate towards each other.
A great deal of these relationships begin as relationships. Michela Cava and Emma Greco are colleagues on PWHL Minnesota who fulfilled when they were both betting the now-defunct Premier Hockey Federation’s Toronto Six. Greco had actually never ever dated a colleague– or a lady– in the past, however states that things simply felt actually natural with Cava and the 2 have actually been together considering that October of 2022.
“When we did fulfill, it was a connection of, like, we seemed like we resembled buddies,” Cava informs SELF.
