In an interview on Ryan Clark's The Pivot, Jonathan Owens recounted how he met his wife Simone Biles and revealed that he didn't know who she was before they started dating.
The Houston Texans safety appeared alongside Biles—who is now the most-decorated gymnast of all time after winning her sixth all-around world championship gold in October—on the podcast, and was asked how he managed to "pull" his now wife. "It's really how she pulled me, man?" he said with a smile.
"I'mma tell you, organic story man," he continued. "I just got to Houston, I probably been to Houston seven months. I was single at the time, so I'm just living, being myself. COVID had just hit, but I had just went to Arizona and one of my boys are like, 'Hey man, you got to check out this app.' I'm like, 'I'll check it out, what is it?' It was called Raya at the time. Basically, it's like a dating app, but you know you have to go through criteria to make sure that you're who you are so."
Within a couple days of being on the app, which is designed for public figures and celebrities, Biles popped up. "I'm like, 'Lemme see who this is.' I never really paid attention to gymnastics," he admitted. "So it piqued my curiosity. ... I swiped her and it said we matched. So I'm like, 'Okay, so I'm going to see what's up.' So I go do my workout, and I come back and I get some likes on my Instagram, you know."
Biles smiled at his mention of her liking his Instagram posts, but he maintained that he wanted to wait before hitting her up first. By the time he was done with his post-workout shower, she messaged him on Raya. "I'm like, 'Man this got to be fake,'" he said. "I didn't know who she was at the time. But the first thing I saw was that she just had a bunch of followers, so in my mind, I'm like, 'Okay she got to be good.'"
When the hosts of the show doubted that he didn't know who she was initially, he suggested he was in college when she won the Olympics. "We didn't have NBC, we didn't have Olympics channels," he shared. "So I'm not paying attention. I never had a moment where I would have watched. Once they did start chatting, they were hanging out by the end of the same week.
"We couldn't do much, because COVID happened and everything was shut down. So she came down to Houston. She lived in the suburbs, so she had to drive about 45 minutes to me," he said. "Then the rest is history."
Clark suggested that Owens was "the catch" in the relationship, to which he replied, "I always say men are the catch, man." He added that she "booked" him and he was "afraid to commit" very early on. "[When] we hung out, man, it was like we hit it off instantly," he recalled. When they hung out, he asked her who her competition was in the world of gymnastics, and she told him, "Myself."
After a clip of Owens' comments circulated on X, formerly Twitter, some suggested that they were only aware of him because of his relationship with Biles.
In a post on Instagram showing a photo of their wedding in Cabo earlier this year, Owens appeared to respond to the the backlash. "Unbothered 😂❤️ Just know we locked in over here 🤞🏽," he wrote.
