It took more than one time at band camp for Suleika Jaouad and Jon Batiste to realize they were meant to be.

She was 13 and the future Grammy winner was 14 that summer in Saratoga Springs, and there was "no crush," Batiste said on a 2021 episode of Hoda Kotb's Making Space podcast. "I was very much a late bloomer."

Jaouad, however, thought he was "a little strange," she said, because she tried to initiate conversation and "it was not happening, not into it. 

She has "always been a great communicator, always magnetic," Batiste added, "always able to communicate the emotions that other people are feeling. I noticed that about her immediately."

Jaouad had "never met anyone quite like him," she recalled on a 2025 episode of Armchair Expert. But so what, as the native New Yorker would surely "never see him again."

"We see this guy who's, like, attracting stares because he had headphones on and he was humming to himself and rocking around and playing the air piano," she recalled. "Everyone was like, 'Who is this crazy dude?'"

It was a certain musician from New Orleans—who also happened to be attending Juilliard.

And Jaouad "just blurted out" to her friend, "'That's the man I'm going to marry someday.'"

That she did, in February 2022, a few months after being diagnosed with leukemia for the second time.

But the couple vowed to enjoy life together no matter what it threw at them, and they haven't wavered in that commitment, including after Jaouad found out in August 2024 that her cancer was back.

"There's an equilibrium to having this illness...and giving it only the attention that it deserves," Batiste said on a January episode of IMO With Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson. "It's not a defining characteristic of our life."

Several days after the couple shared a carousel of enjoying-life-together pics—"How's everybody doing," Jaouad captioned the snaps, with Batiste replying, "High vibrational frequencies"—the We Are artist announced Aug. 12 that he was canceling multiple shows while he navigated "some personal circumstances."

Though life has thrown them for multiple loops—the 2023 documentary American Symphony shows Batiste being nominated for 11 Grammys on Nov. 23, 2021, the same day Jaouad started treatment—Batiste had all the info he needed when he dove into a relationship with the writer and never looked back.

But first they were just friends, Jaouad playing double bass in a pre-college program at Juilliard (before getting her BA in Near Eastern studies from Princeton) while Batiste concentrated in jazz studies.

She was 22 when she was first diagnosed with leukemia in 2011. The aspiring foreign correspondent ended up documenting her medical journey in her New York Times column "Life, Interrupted."

When Batiste found out she was sick, he brought his band to the hospital to show up in the best way he knew how.

"It was a real moment of clarity that I had to do something," he recalled on Making Space. "And what I do was music."

What he didn't know was that she had just heard chemotherapy wasn't working and her only remaining option was an experimental clinical trial.

"Jon showed up in the middle of that," Jaouad remembered, and his impromptu concert "wasn't just for me and my family, it was the whole cancer ward."

But that's just who he is, she noted, "someone who shows up in the difficult moments and who keeps on showing up not just for me, but for everybody."

When they started dating in their mid-20s, it was "such a beautiful time," the 38-year-old said on IMO, calling herself "dazzled" and "totally befuddled" by Batiste.

"He was unlike anyone I'd ever met," she continued. During their first official week together, "we went to a park and Jon sat me down and he said, 'What are your intentions?' Which nobody had ever asked me before."

Batiste said the moment "felt monumental...like that conversation was a major turning point."

And, as Jaouad told CBS News in April 2022 when revealing she and Batiste were husband and wife, their first week of dating was also "when Jon first brought up the topic of marriage to me. So, we've had eight years. This is not, you know, a hasty decision!"

Batiste popped the question after they found out she had cancer again, but assured her he'd been planning to propose no matter what.

The day after their "tiny, beautiful, little ceremony" using bread ties for rings, Jaouad entered the hospital to undergo a bone marrow transplant.

The newlyweds were "on cloud nine," she said. "We were so happy, so brimming with love and positivity from this beautiful evening that we'd had. And I really believe that that carried us through."

After learning she was in remission, she told Vanity Fair in 2023, she was determined to go on "living every day as if it’s my first, waking up as a newborn does and beholding the world with awe and wonder and curiosity."

And while life has since presented a slew of new challenges—"entire days disappear into appointments and infusions and the fog of fatigue and the administrative labor of having a body," Jaouad wrote on Instagram July 16 in a post celebrating a day she felt "surprisingly well"—she and her husband are still in it to win it.

"It's in the vows," Batiste said on IMO. "You just decide that when we're in it, however it needs to be set up and it's going to be ever evolving. It's going to be a range of different realities that we can't predict, so let's exist with the commitment that we made and move however we need to move."