Justin Gaethje, the UFC’s lightweight champion, has no wife. He has said so himself, twice, within about three weeks of each other, and both times he explained why instead of giving a plain yes or no.
Three days before he fought Paddy Pimblett for the interim lightweight title at UFC 324 in January, he told MMA Weekly, “I don’t have kids. I’ve never been married… I do want children, but I don’t want children until I can be what my parents were for me.” He added that he hasn’t found “a girl that I trust to have kids with.”
A few weeks later, on The Stephen A. Smith Show, he talked about it again, this time in more detail. He didn’t name anyone in either conversation.
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Where the girlfriend rumor actually comes from
For more than two years, entertainment sites have written about Gaethje as if he’s in a relationship with Sophia Romano, a model and content creator based in New York. Most versions repeat the same handful of details: that the two met on a dating app, that she previously worked in television production, and that photos of them together go back to 2023.
Photos of the two of them do exist. The earliest anyone has placed them together is 2023, and the most recent is from a wedding in Cancรบn in July 2024. A separate claim has been spreading alongside those photos, that the two have actually been together for close to ten years. That would put the start of the relationship around 2016. Nothing in any of her posts or in any article about the two of them comes close to that timeline.
Her own account tells a clearer story
People who actually follow Romano’s account had noticed something was off long before any of this reached the search engines. Comments asking whether the two had split up started showing up under that Cancรบn post more than a year after it went up. Some told them to “stop playing and get back together.” Those comments clustered through the end of last year and into the first weeks of this one, the same stretch when Gaethje was telling MMA Weekly he’d never found anyone. As recently as this June, someone commented on the same photo asking simply, “2026?” Neither of them has ever answered.
That silence has held through the biggest year of his career. He won the undisputed title at the White House in June, then attended the UFC Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Las Vegas in July, Fanatics Fest in New York later that month, and UFC 330 in Philadelphia this August. Photos from all four show him alone. Her own posts from this year, the most recent from May and July, don’t mention him either.
Google can’t decide either
Search his name this week and the answer Google generates at the top of the page changes depending on how the question is worded. Ask if he has a wife, and it says he is single and unmarried. Ask if he’s still with Sophia Romano, and a different answer describes a long-term relationship running for roughly a decade, with the two of them supposedly living separately in the same city to protect his training. Google credits that detail to something Gaethje “previously noted.” He hasn’t said that in any interview or broadcast on record.
Some of the divorce and “ex-wife” results that turn up in the same searches belong to someone else entirely. Ilia Topuria, the fighter Gaethje beat for the title, went through a real, public divorce that became part of their pre-fight trash talk. It has nothing to do with Gaethje.
What he says about it himself
Asked directly why he doesn’t have a girlfriend or a wife, Gaethje answered without much hesitation.
“It is boring, boring, lonely, but I guess it’s by choice. If I could find someone that was pleasant to be around daily, then I would have a girlfriend or a wife. But I’ve just never found somebody. I also don’t leave my house, so there’s no way for me to meet people.”
Asked whether dating had ever affected his fighting, he said it had.
“I would say worse. Not physical. Mental for sure. These girls are crazy, bro. There’s all distractions, a lot of emotions, never quiet.”
He also said he needs what he calls “instability” during fight camp, room to disappear for weeks at a time without anyone waiting on him. Bringing someone into that, he said, “is going to be difficult.” He’s said he wants kids eventually, once his career winds down, which by his own timeline puts it around 2027. On marriage, though, he’d already settled it. “I will never get married,” he said. “Never.”
