NBA champion Giannis Antetokounmpo is currently navigating a season of change. The 31-year-old superstar just left behind the Milwaukee Bucks, the only team he’s played for in his career (since 2013), for the Miami Heat. Something that’s keeping him steady in this new chapter is his wife, Mariah Antetokounmpo. The two have been together for 11 years, and they share four children. He told AnesTea the Podcast host Anestis Evangelopoulos during a recent conversation that she is the biggest and best investment he’s made in life, telling him the truth when he needs to hear it most and keeping him and his children grounded. They’ve come a long way from their first meeting.

“It was her aura,” he says of encountering her at a Summer League basketball game his brother Thanasis was playing with the New York Knicks more than a decade ago. “She was like my mother. She had this beautiful smile.”

She walked past him, and he said, “Now that’s a girl I could see as my wife. Because she had this positive vibe about her. But I was always very shy. Very shy. So I told a friend of mine, ‘Can you go ask her for her number?'”

Mariah was talking to someone else at the time, but told his friend that Giannis could follow her Instagram. Still, she set boundaries. She told the soon-to-be star after he DM’d her that because she was still engaging with another guy, she didn’t feel “comfortable” connecting further with him. He agreed to keep it cute, leaving the ball in her court should she ever become interested in more.

“I knew she liked comics. I was at the Istanbul airport, and I bought a comic book and sent her a picture. ‘If you want to talk about this comic in your spare time in the future, I am here.’ And then I disappeared,” he recalls. “After three or four months, she sent me a message saying that she would come visit for the All-Star break, asking me about my plans. I told her I was going to Miami with my family. And she asked me if I wanted her to come. I was like, ‘Come!’ That’s it.”

So she flew herself out.

“Three or four days after I got to Miami, I got a message saying, ‘I am here.’ And not only that, she met my aunt and my cousins on the first day. She was in the kitchen with my mother cooking, and she was hanging out with my father. And I felt like she was already part of my family. Day one!”

Now thousands of days into a relationship, with a whole family to show for their love, Giannis says they work because they communicate all the time openly.

“Always in life, communicate. Communication is the best tool. The moment you don’t communicate, people build unrealistic expectations, and it ruins you. That’s why I think me and Mariah are a very good couple. We’re always able to tell each other the truth. ‘This is what I’m expecting from you. This is how I feel in this moment.’ And this has really helped us as a couple,” he said.

Again, finding a truth-teller has always been paramount for Giannis. And her ability to provide that reality check to him, and even to their four children, lets him know he found his person for sure.

“When I got to Milwaukee, and saw what it’s like to be an NBA athlete, a ‘superstar,’ I realized that I needed people who would tell me the truth. I’d rather you tell me the ugly truth than a beautiful lie,” he said. “I had to find someone to be by my side every day, someone who could tell it to me like it is, to me and my kids. It’s important. The biggest investment in life is the person you’ll spend your whole life with. My wife holds the keys to my heart, to my brain, to my wallet, and most importantly, she holds the keys to my home. She stays with my kids when I’m traveling. She could easily tell the kids, “Your father left for another trip and left us here. He doesn’t want to be with us.’ But no, she’s telling them the truth. ‘Your dad came from nothing. He is out there working right now so you can go to school and have food on your plate.'”

That said, when people question their connection, he’s unbothered by it because he knows he’s blessed to have Mariah.

“I’ve heard so many things. ‘Why is Giannis with this wife? He could be with a model. Not one model, but 10!’ But I am with my wife because she tells me the truth; she loves me; she will tell me whenever I do something wrong; she will tell my kids the truth. I know that she will kill for my kids, and she would even kill me for them. I know that she won’t let my kids get a big head, and that’s the most important thing for me. And I am in love. I am in love with her.”