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’ve written the phrase “I want what they have” on this website countless times before, but it’s possible I’ve never meant it quite as much as I do when it comes to WNBA star Paige Bueckers and her newly confirmed girlfriend and former UConn Huskies teammate, Azzi Fudd.
Bueckers and Fudd let the beat of their love build privately for four full seasons at UConn, but now they’re officially together: In an interview with WAG Talk, Bueckers identified Fudd as her partner, even adding that Fudd’s phone case has the words “Paige Bueckers’s girlfriend” on it. Adorable! We love an accessory-based hard launch!
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While historically, I haven’t been much of a WNBA gay (although I did attend my first Los Angeles Sparks game last week, and they won? Possibly—or, admittedly, possibly not—because I was there?), but the notion of Bueckers and Fudd falling in love while they dribbled around each other on the UConn court is so sweet, I can’t even stand it. Just to make it about me a little bit more, the Huskies were the team I grew up hearing the most about, thanks to the fact that my paternal grandparents hail from Connecticut. It thrills me to think that the team whose games were on in the background while I sat my little closeted-gay self on the carpet and thought a lot about Keira Knightley is now responsible for one of the highest-profile queer relationships in women’s basketball.
Listening to Bueckers correctly answer a slew of questions about her “D1 girlfriend” on WAG Talk was extremely charming, but those of us lucky enough to be homosexual (or who just pay good attention to WNBA TikTok) have had the privilege of knowing, or at least suspecting, that Bueckers and Fudd were together for a while; earlier this month, the pair met up with the StudBudz—a.k.a. Minnesota Lynx players and besties Courtney Williams and Natisha Hiedeman—at an WNBA All-Star Weekend after-party and were referred to as a “power couple” by Hiedeman.
Fudd first showed off her “Paige Bueckers’s Girlfriend” phone case in a selfie she posted to Instagram back in June and went viral on TikTok with a video about receiving the “princess treatment” every time she’s out in public with Bueckers—so, again, the evidence has been there for some time now. Still, it’s nice to receive confirmation that they really are obsessed with each other and not just being projected upon by a bunch of gay-dating-gossip-starved fans who need another source of sapphic relationship intrigue to focus on now that season two of Queer Ultimatum is over. Hooray, Paige and Azzi! May your love last as long as a basketball game feels to me (a.k.a. endless!).
