Aaron Rodgers said on Sept. 10 that he met his wife, Brittani, in 2017 and still regrets not begging her to stay when she was leaving the United States for Europe. He said the moment passed so fast that he did not propose then and later spent years carrying that choice with him.
Rodgers made the comments on the Not Just Football podcast, giving one of the clearest public timelines yet for the start of his marriage. He said he and Brittani later eloped in 2025, after years in which he described the relationship as stretched by distance and by the changes in both of their lives.
The detail matters because Rodgers rarely talks about his private life in plain terms, and this time he did more than confirm that he is married. He said he met Brittani in 2017, said the two were separated by an ocean for much of the relationship, and said she was engaged during part of that time. That is the part of the story that fills in the gap between a quiet marriage and a public figure whose personal life has often been a topic of speculation.
He also said the meeting changed the way he handled everything that came after. Rodgers said he was emotionally unavailable for seven or eight years after meeting the person he believed would change his life, and that he poured everything into football instead. But the timeline he gave does not line up neatly with the rest of his dating history. He said he dated Danica Patrick from 2018 to 2020, got engaged to Shailene Woodley in 2021, and dated Olivia Munn in the mid-2010s, all after saying he had already met the person he was meant to be with.
That contradiction sits at the center of his account. Rodgers said he knew he was meant to be with Brittani and could not move on, yet he also described relationships that were public, prolonged and, in Woodley’s case, ended in an engagement that was called off a year later. In 2024, Woodley told Outside magazine that a romance tied to the timing of her relationship with Rodgers sent her into a depression. Rodgers answered that version of events with blunt rejection, saying he did not care about the rumors surrounding Brittani and dismissing talk that his wife is not real.
What Rodgers left unexplained is how the two reconnected after being separated for so long, and after Brittani had been engaged. He did, however, say the regret still stings: his biggest mistake, he said, was not asking her to stay or proposing on the spot when she was leaving for Europe. That leaves the story where it matters most now — not in the rumor mill around his marriage, but in the unresolved question of how a meeting in 2017 turned into an elopement eight years later.
