Watch: Venus Williams Marries Andrea Preti in 5-Day Palm Beach Wedding
Venus Williams has yet to evolve away from tennis.
The 46-year-old has taken breaks from the game, some health and injury-related, but also to go live life—such as when she married actor-director Andrea Preti multiple times last year, swapping vows in Italy before making it official in her adopted hometown of Palm Beach.
But unlike sister Serena Williams, who returned to the sport this summer after seemingly calling it a career in 2022, Venus never bothered to retire. And while you can’t say she hasn’t lost a step—the seven-time Grand Slam singles champion hasn’t hoisted a trophy in a decade—showing up is the win.
“I do what I do because I want to live life the way I want to, unapologetically, with no regrets, on my terms,” Venus told Tennis last August. “Do my terms always come out the way I want them to? No. But at least I tried to live on my own terms, and that’s super important to me.”
So, 29 years after her U.S. Open debut, Venus will be back in action this week, having accepted a wild card to play doubles with Serena and compete in singles at Flushing Meadows.
But whether the 2025 doubles quarterfinalist pulls off a rare solo win or not, Preti will be at the forefront of her cheering section.
In fact, it was Preti who “really encouraged me to keep playing,” Venus told Rennae Stubbs in July 2025 at the Mubadala DC Open in Washington, D.C., where she was playing for the first time in 16 months. “There were so many times where I just wanted to coast and kind of chill.”
And after her opening match victory made her the second-oldest woman to ever win a singles match on the WTA Tour (Martina Navratilova set the record in 2004 at 47), Venus also took the opportunity to reveal that she was engaged.
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Despite being in the public eye for three decades, the athlete and entrepreneur has kept her dating life extremely private, not least because she was usually too busy doing her own thing to make time for relationships.
“I have a lot of friends who don’t believe me when I say that I like my life and I don’t want to change it for any reason,” she told Cosmopolitan in 2021. “I’m not desperate and they don’t believe me.”
But while on a sisters’ trip to Lake Como during Milan Fashion Week in June 2024, Venus met Preti at a Gucci event she was invited to at the last minute.
“I told her, ‘You’re so beautiful,’ and then she started speaking with me in Italian,” Preti, who was born in Denmark and moved to Italy as a teenager, recalled their meet-cute to Vogue after their December wedding festivities. “We had a little talk, and I asked if she wanted a drink.”
Venus, who had been single for six years, appreciated that Preti was “a normal person.”
As in, she told The Knot in February, “He wanted to call me. A lot of people don’t want to call or talk on the phone in this day and age of dating.”
And he continued to do “all the right things,” Venus said. “He took the time and the energy to come see me. We met in Italy, and then the next week I was in London, and he took the time to come all the way [there].”
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Preti also was by her side when she underwent surgery for uterine fibroids a month into their relationship. “We were going through a lot,” she told Vogue, “and he supported me.”
But even after only a few dates in London, “I just knew I was going to marry him,” she remembered. “People always say they just know, and I just knew.”
Preti got the message, proposing in Tuscany on Jan. 31, 2025.
Also keeping her relationship status under wraps, Venus sounded noncommittal about returning to tennis while attending the Miami Open that March, sharing in a tournament video, “I really don’t have a plan for the first time in my life.”
When Venus did return to the game a few months later—and won her first match—she emphasized afterward that she had “nothing to prove” and was “here for me because I want to be here.”
And, win or lose, she was appreciative that her body was obliging.
“When you play unhealthy, it’s in your mind. It’s not just how you feel,” she told reporters at the U.S. Open following a first-round singles loss. “So, it was nice to be freer.”
Getting match tough hadn’t been easy, Venus admitted, noting that she took “no days off” preparing for the final grand slam of the year.
“I haven’t gone to dinner. I haven’t seen friends,” she shared. “I haven’t done anything except train for three months as hard as I could.”
Venus understandably needed a break—”To stay interested in tennis,” she explained to Oprah Winfrey in 2003, “I have to mix it up with other things”—so the following month, she quietly swapped vows with Preti in Ischia, Italy.
“But we didn’t have enough time to do the paperwork,” Venus told Vogue, hence their subsequent week-long celebration in Florida that culminated in a civil ceremony Dec. 20, followed by a lavish wedding the next day.
Yet as much as they cherished tying the knot—”I can’t describe how beautiful, calm, sacred, exciting, and exalting it was,” Venus told Vogue—the couple know that married life isn’t an endless party.
So, they said “I do” to showing up for each other every day. “We focus on simple things,” Preti, who said he was “very protective” of his wife, explained to The Knot. “Small things make a difference.”
For instance, he shared, “Every morning, we say, ‘Good morning. I love you.’ I do it because I feel [it], but I also know that this is the right thing to do.”
And Venus has vowed to bring the effort that made her a champion athlete to her marriage.
“Greatness was always about how I could give my best mentally, physically, emotionally. And if I had done that, I was great,” she explained. And in a relationship, “greatness would be to continue to give that effort, even when it seems like you might not want to.”
Being great didn’t guarantee a win, Venus admitted, but “however you approach something, whatever you put into it, you’re going to get out what you give.”
See more tennis stars who’ve found love with a winning partner:
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