J. Cole & His Wife Have Come A Long Way

Earlier this year, J.Cole was speaking to Creed director Ryan Coogler at a Martin Luther King day event, when the director mistakenly revealed to the crowd that J. Cole was a married man. Ever a private person, especially concerning his relationship, Cole laughed off the question and replied, "That was like the one thing to not do. But it's all good... They know now." Since every one does know now that J. Cole is married, it was only natural to be curious to know more about his new wife, Melissa Heholt. You know, things like, how did Melissa Heholt and J. Cole meet?

One thing about Heholt and Cole is that they are extremely private. Cole has very rarely ever spoken about his now-wife in public and very little information on their relationship exists. When looking into these two, though, it is widely reported that they met while they were both studying at St. John's University in Queens, New York. Cole graduated summa cum laude in 2007, with a major in communications and minor in business, with an impressive 3.82 GPA! Most sources claim that they met during their sophomore year, which means their meeting would have been around 2004.

This lines up with the claim that they have been together well over a decade, which is a feat in itself considering he's a famous and successful rapper and all that. Although they haven't really explicitly spoken about their relationship, Cole did do a rare interview in which he spoke about the idea of marriage and mentioned a relationship. He told Hip Hop Canada in 2013,

I feel like relationships are a beautiful thing, period. Relationships can be really beautiful, they can be really hard, they can be really rewarding, or they can be bad relationships where it’s really detrimental and hurtful, but that’s life, period. But then marriage, marriage is just a relationship to me. In my experience, when you’ve been in a relationship for as long as I’ve been in one, there’s no real difference. It’s just a piece of paper that validates what was already real.

What's that? J. Cole saying he's been a very long-term relationship? Your eyes do not deceive you. At the point of this interview, he and Heholt would have already been together over eight years and it sure sounds like marriage was on his mind but not a priority, because they probably already considered each other close enough to be husband and wife, anyway.

Heholt is now a very successful event and wedding planner with her own company, Statice Events, while also being the executive director of J. Cole's Dreamville Foundation. According to her company's site, she graduated with an M.S. in Childhood Education and eventually decided to pursue her passion in event planning. These two are intelligent, grounded, ambitious, and clearly, in love, so I expect to see a lot more inspiring projects from them in the future.