Sue Bird has opened up about her relationship with Megan Rapinoe, with the professional basketball player sharing the major thing that she wants people to take away from their union.
Bird, 41 has been dating Rapinoe, 36, for more than five years, with the couple announcing their engagement in October 2020. According to Bird, who acknowledges the love and praise she and her fiancée receive from fans, the normalcy of their relationship is something to be celebrated.
The basketball player discussed her fiancée and what she hopes their fans and followers take away from their relationship in a recent interview withE! News, where she explained how she and the professional soccer player are just people “in love” who live “authentically”.
“Hopefully they just see two people who are in love but are also living their lives authentically,” she said. “When I think about my childhood and then my early adult years, something around being gay and the things being said about the LGBTQ community, it was as if they were the weirdos. As if they were the strange ones in the room.”
The athlete emphasised that when she and the soccer player are spotted together, they simply want to be viewed as “happy” and “living their lives.”
“I think it’s so important that when Megan and I are walking down the street, there could be a little gay kid that says: ‘Oh! They’re not the weird ones,’” she said. “’They’re just happy and they’re living their lives’ and I feel like that’s just so important. For me in middle school, high school, even in college, the gay one was the weird one and I just feel really passionately that we’re able to change that.”
Bird also revealed that what she admires most about Rapinoe is her ability to “put others first,” and her use of social media as a way of highlighting different issues.
“What impresses me most about Megan is her willingness to put others first,” she continued. “She really is someone who is clearly willing to use her platform and her privilege to shed light on all these other issues and I think a lot of people would worry about what would happen to them.”
More specifically, Bird recalled a moment where Rapinoe kneeled in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick as a form of protest against racial injustices and police brutality during the National Anthem at the United States women’s soccer game in 2016. According to Bird, Rapinoe didn’t care if she got any “heat” for it.
“It was just getting the message out about police brutality and going from there,” Bird said. “She took some heat but it didn’t bother her. Not a lot of people operate that way, but Megan does.”
Bird has previously revealed how Rapinoe encouraged her to speak publicly about her sexuality. “What Megan helped me understand was that, yes, what I was already doing was great, living authentically,” the basketball player told Time last July. “But it was important to say it, because the more people that come out, that’s where you get to the point where nobody has to come out. Where you can just live. And it’s not a story.”
