Swizz Beatz was “scared” of Alicia Keys when he first met her at his Bronx high school when the two were teenagers.

Keys appeared on “The Drew Barrymore Show” and retraced the path of the couple’s origin story. “Crazily, we’ve known each other since I was 15 and he was 16,” Keys said. “We both grew up in New York City, and a mutual friend said to him, ‘You have to meet my friend Alicia.’”

“I was very unimpressed,” Keys said as the audience laughed. She shared that she wasn’t interested in Beatz romantically at that initial meeting. Neither was Beatz because Keys was dressed in a North Face jacket with a tough girl swag and she told Barrymore that Beatz was a little scared of her. However, years later, they reconnected on a music project in 2008. It was that second meeting that shifted everything. 

Keys has written about the experience in her memoir, “More Myself.” She noted that while Swizz would “pull up in some fancy car, rolling deep with his Bronx crew and shining with diamonds,” there was more to him than the image, and their conversations revealed his curiosity and awareness about the world. The creative chemistry turned to romance, and by 2010, they announced their engagement and that they were expecting. 

And now the two have been married for 15 years. They were married in 2010 in a private ceremony on the Mediterranean Sea, officiated by family friend Deepak Chopra. “Everything was just wow. It was a blessing,” Beatz later said of their wedding. “It was positive energy, and we’re still in those moments.”

Their relationship quickly moved into family life as they welcomed their first son together, Egypt Daoud Dean later in 2010 and their second son together, Genesis Ali Dean in 2014. Swizz has three children from previous relationships, Prince Nasir, Kasseem Jr. and Nicole. 

Thank goodness that first impression didn’t stick!