In just a few short years, Coco Gauff has become one of the world’s top tennis stars. Currently at third in the WTA rankings, Gauff has won 10 singles titles to date, including the 2023 U.S. Open and the 2025 French Open. Also one of the two flagbearers for the United States at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, Gauff is also a very popular athlete with more than 2 million Instagram followers and a number of high-profile endorsement deals, including New Balance, Ray-Bay Meta, and Rolex.
But even with her celebrity, Gauff is notoriously private about her personal life. “I think I felt like I just, some parts of myself I love to share and then some parts I think I just keep to myself,” she told People in 2024. One of the cards she has kept close to the vest is the identity of her boyfriend, Jalen Sera, whom she recently went “Instagram-official” with earlier this summer.
Curious to learn more about Coco Gauff’s boyfriend? Here are five facts you need to know about Jalen Sera:
1. Jalen is from North Carolina.
Born in Durham, he also has a twin brother named Terence. Although it appears he and his family moved to Atlanta, where Gauff was born and grew up, at some point. Per Time, Gauff’s mother, Candi, was his fourth-grade teacher. “He’s always been a smart, nice kid,” Candi told the magazine in April 2024.
During the interview, Gauff noted that she and Sera had been together for “a year” by this point. “This is my first real relationship,” Gauff said at the time. “To just have someone to talk to who is not involved in tennis at all gives me a fresh perspective.”
2. He wants to be an actor.
In a 2024 cover interview with Vogue, Gauff didn’t want to reveal too much about Sera at the time, including his identity. But she did offer a few breadcrumbs: “He’s a very nice guy. He’s in school now. He’s about to apply for music school. He wants to be an actor and he plays the guitar. He’s not from Delray. He’s actually from Atlanta. And actually, um, I will say this: People on Twitter found him two or three days ago. I won’t respond and confirm if it’s him or not, but they caught me in the comments, so they know. Some people thought it was someone in tennis and that couldn’t be further from the truth.”
He also has an IMDB page with a few credits to his name already.
3. He’s a calming presence.
After a disappointing loss at the 2022 French Open, Gauff told reporters later that she got too in her head about it. She course-corrected the night before the 2023 U.S. Open, which she won, after a calming conversation with Sera.
“Honestly, I didn’t have any of those visions [of winning] till last night,” she told reporters after the U.S. Open. “You know, I thought about it, but I told myself to get it out of my head, because that’s what I did at [the] French [Open]. I was envisioning, you know, what would happen if I would win. I think I wanted it too much.”
“Last night, I started a little bit, but honestly, I just called my boyfriend, and I told him let’s talk until it’s time to go to sleep so we spoke until 1:00 a.m. and then I went to sleep.”
4. He sends her flowers.
According to Us Weekly, on Valentine’s Day in 2025, Gauff posted a photo via her Instagram Story of a bouquet of roses gifted to her from Sera, with the note: “Happy Valentine’s Day, star! I love you. What we have will mean everything to me, forever and always.”
5. The couple is very low-key.
While they comment on each other’s Instagram posts frequently, Gauff and Sera haven’t shared permanent photos of each other on their social media profiles, except once. In June, Gauff shared a carousel of casual photos, and the fourth one down has an image of four people, including both Gauff and Sera. This was taken by many fans to be considered a “hard launch” even though the couple had been together for two years at that point.
Rachel King (she/her) is a news writer at Town & Country. Before joining T&C, she spent nearly a decade as an editor at Fortune. Her work covering travel and lifestyle has appeared in Forbes, Observer, Robb Report, Cruise Critic, and Cool Hunting, among others. Originally from San Francisco, she lives in New York with her wife, their daughter, and a precocious labradoodle. Follow her on Instagram at .
