Karl-Anthony Towns and Jordyn Woods have spent five years building a relationship that began as friendship and deepened under pressure. Towns, the 7-foot-tall center from the Dominican Republic, has said the two met years ago through mutual friends, long before they started dating.
What made the relationship harder to separate from ordinary romance was timing. Towns said in 2021 that the COVID-19 pandemic forced them to decide whether they would remain friends or become something more, and they chose to take the latter path. Woods said it was a very organic relationship and that they had already been best friends for a while.
The pair’s connection also grew out of grief. Towns’s mother, Jacqueline, died in April 2020 from complications of COVID-19 at 59, while Woods’s father, John Woods, died of cancer in 2017. Woods said they understood each other through the experience of losing a parent at a very young age, and Towns said he leaned on her because she was one of the only people who actually knew how he was feeling and what he was going through.
That mutual understanding has shown up in the way they speak about each other. Towns has said his love for Woods knows no bounds and described her as a light in his life, saying he felt that after his mother died, someone who meant so much to him was replaced by another woman who took that spot. Woods has echoed the same closeness, saying, “We know each other. We know each other’s hearts. We know each other on good days and bad days and we’ve been through a lot of bad days together.”
Their support for one another has extended beyond grief. Towns posted that Woods stayed with him in the hospital overnight and helped him in rehab after he was hit by a drunk driver in Los Angeles during the offseason. He also said she stayed with him during his stint with COVID. Towns later said she had held him down more than the world knows, pointing to the losses in his family, the car crash and his illness as moments when she stayed with him every step of the way.
Woods has made similar public gestures. She posted about visiting 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with Towns, and the two have also shown up together in lighter moments, including Halloween, when Woods dressed as Little Red Riding Hood and Towns wore a werewolf costume. Those snapshots sit alongside a relationship that has been defined less by celebrity polish than by a sense of shared history.
There is also a broader public thread running through their partnership. Woods said Towns’s work on social justice initiatives was only the start of different projects they were working on behind the scenes, and she pointed to his community efforts in Minnesota and the response to the George Floyd incident. That makes their story more than a celebrity timeline. It is a relationship built on private loss, public recovery and a partnership they have both treated as something lasting.
The question that mattered at the start has already been answered by their own words and actions. Woods and Towns did not just stay together through hardship; they built the bond on it.
