Before Zohran Mamdani was the mayor of New York City, he was a nervous guy staring at a dating app, hands shaking, waiting to see if a woman named Rama Duwaji would reply to his message about crème brûlée. In a new interview with Complex’s *360 With Jillian* released around July 1, 2026, Mamdani opened up about how his Hinge match in 2021 became a three-continent love story — and why he screenshotted her profile before she even matched him back.
He Saw Her Photo and That Was Already It
Mamdani didn’t try to frame the Hinge story as anything other than what it was: an immediate, slightly embarrassing, completely human fall. ‘I think I was in love from the moment I saw her photo,’ he told host Jillian Superstar. ‘I screenshotted her Hinge profile before she even matched back… I had to kind of just hold it in for a little bit.’ That screenshot — saved on his phone before she’d said a single word to him — is the kind of detail that makes a story feel true.
When she did match, he didn’t just type something and send. Rama’s profile mentioned loving crème brûlée, and Mamdani spent hours overthinking an opener built around it, down to suggesting where to go. His hands were shaking while he waited for her reply. The man who would go on to win the NYC mayoral primary in June 2025 and get sworn in as mayor in January 2026 was, in that moment, completely undone by a notification. ‘And then when you meet the love of your life,’ he said, ‘to actually be living what felt like a fantasy when you first saw their face — it’s hard to believe.’ Much like the way other modern couples have gone public about meeting on apps, Mamdani and Duwaji treat the Hinge origin not as an embarrassment to soften but as the actual beginning of the story.
Who Is Rama Duwaji — and Why She Matters Beyond the Title
Rama Duwaji is a Syrian-American animator, illustrator, and ceramicist born in Texas who spent part of her childhood in Dubai. Her work — which centers on communal themes, sisterhood, and Middle Eastern identity — has been published in The New Yorker and The Washington Post and exhibited at the Tate Modern. She is, in short, not a political accessory. She was already building a serious career before Mamdani’s profile grew, and she has largely kept it that way.
When right-wing media tried to make her a target during the mayoral race, Mamdani was blunt: ‘Three months ago, I married the love of my life, Rama, at the City Clerk’s office. Now, right-wing trolls are trying to make this race about her. Rama isn’t just my wife. She’s an incredible artist who deserves to be known on her own terms.’ That defense landed — not because it was strategically calculated, but because it matched everything else he’d said about her. It felt consistent.
Three Ceremonies, Three Continents, One Subway Pole
The path from that crème brûlée message to marriage covered a lot of geography. They got engaged in October 2024. A private nikkah followed in December 2024 in Dubai, where Rama grew up. In February 2025, they formalized everything at the New York City Clerk’s Office — and then took what became probably the most-shared photo of their relationship: Rama in a white dress and black boots, bouquet in hand, both of them grinning and holding a subway pole at Union Square station while regular commuters stood around them, unbothered. It was gritty and romantic and very New York. And then, in July 2025, a fourth celebration in Uganda, Mamdani’s birth country, closed the loop.
The Complex interview — casual, wide-ranging, mixing politics with music and personal life — caught Mamdani visibly glowing when the subject turned to Rama. He called himself ‘very much a romantic.’ The host called him ‘the People’s Wingman.’ The clip went viral across X, Instagram, and TikTok almost immediately, and the reaction was largely the same everywhere: people are not used to seeing a sitting mayor talk about his wife like this, with that specific kind of giddiness that hasn’t been coached out of him yet. Both of them deleted Hinge after meeting. He’s framed it as the best ad the app never paid for.
