Drake Maye’s Wife Reveals Biggest Challenge in Their First Year of Marriage

Drake Maye and his wife, Ann Michael Maye, have already packed quite a bit of life into their early 20s.

The longtime couple went from growing up together in North Carolina to navigating Maye's rise as one of the NFL's biggest young stars. They married in June 2025, and at just 23 years old, they now find themselves building a life together in New England.

For all the excitement that has come with it, however, one part hasn't necessarily been easy.

Ann Michael opened up about their first year of marriage in a new interview with Us Weekly, revealing that the biggest challenge wasn't adjusting to her husband's growing profile or the demands that come with an NFL season.

It was being so far from home.

“Moving to somewhere so completely different, being away from all of our friends and family is probably the most challenging part,” Ann Michael told the outlet.

For two people whose lives had always been rooted in North Carolina, that was no small change.

Ann Michael Maye Opens Up About Leaving Home Behind

Maye and Ann Michael's relationship stretches back years before NFL Sundays and packed stadiums became part of their routine.

Both are from North Carolina, and Ann Michael explained just how close their families remain. Their parents live in the same neighborhood, meaning home was never particularly far away before Maye's football career brought them to New England.

“We were never too far from family,” she said. “That’s been the biggest adjustment.” But New England has slowly started to feel less like a destination and more like home.

Ann Michael credited Maye's Patriots teammates and their significant others with giving the young couple a community after the move.

“Luckily, we have great teammates and great friends here that have really made the New England area feel like home, which is great,” she said.

Those friendships have become especially important because life in the NFL can be difficult to explain to someone who isn't living it.

“We’re all experiencing the same things, living the same sort of life, which I think is sometimes so different from other fields of work and other people don’t necessarily understand exactly what you’re going through,” Ann Michael explained.

While Maye has his teammates beside him inside the Patriots locker room, Ann Michael has found her own circle among their wives and girlfriends.

“It’s made it so fun and it’s really cool that he is obviously friends with all of his teammates, and I’ve become friends with the wives,” she said. “It’s one big community where we can all spend time together.”

Drake Maye and His Wife Aren’t Living a Typical Life at 23

If Ann Michael ever needs a reminder of just how different her life has become, she apparently doesn't have to look much further than her college friends.

At 23, many of them are beginning careers, sharing apartments and settling into post-college life.

Ann Michael, meanwhile, is married to an NFL quarterback and building a home hundreds of miles from the place where she grew up.

The contrast has become something of a running joke.

“I joke with my friends from college all the time,” she said. “They’re like, ‘Ann-Michael, we are living the most opposite lives right now.’”

She described friends living together in cities and heading to their 9-to-5 jobs while marriage still feels far off for many of them.

“They think I’m, like, 30 or something,” Ann Michael joked. “I just turned 23. They’re like, ‘You’re living a life 10 years in advance of us.’”

In some ways, she is.

Maye and Ann Michael started dating when they were young and remained together as his football career accelerated from North Carolina to the NFL. New England selected Maye with the No. 3 overall pick in the 2024 NFL Draft, instantly making the former Tar Heels star a central figure in the Patriots' future.

The couple married the following summer, taking another major step together while Maye's NFL career was just beginning to take off.

That shared history appears to have given them something steady amid an extraordinary amount of change.

“Starting dating at such a young age, going through all these phases of life together, driving has been at the center of it all,” Ann Michael said while discussing the couple's partnership with CarGurus.

The scenery around them may look very different these days. Their families are farther away, Sundays carry considerably higher stakes and their lives hardly resemble those of many other 23-year-olds.

But after spending so much of their lives growing up alongside one another, Drake and Ann Michael are once again figuring out the next chapter together.

And this time, they're beginning to make New England feel like home.

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