travel buddies

From gym crushes to fiancés, meet the couple making our hearts pound on ‘The Amazing Race’

By · Updated on January 26, 2024
Image Credit: ‘The Amazing Race,’ CBS

And they’re off!

Last night, the 35th season of CBS’s globe-trotting competition series, The Amazing Race, hit the ground running.

The show has remained a reality TV favorite since premiering in 2001, both for its eye-popping travel p*rn and its focus on interpersonal dynamics. No matter the connection between its teams of two—siblings, partners, BFFs, co-workers, parent-child—you know they’re going to start quibbling the minute they have to drive stick-shift through the middle of nowhere.

Over the seasons, the show’s given us plenty of great LGBTQ+ pairs to root for, and the latest is the recently engaged couple Joe Moskowitz and Ian Todd.

Hailing from New York City, Moskowitz, 35, and Todd, 40, already have us swooning. The season premiere saw them move quickly out to gate, traversing tightropes and Los Angeles traffic, eventually arriving in Thailand where they *spoiler* finished 9th and remain to race another day.

And the first leg destination was an extra special one for the couple, as Thailand’s where they got engaged this past November!

Speaking with Out, Todd reveals got down on his knee and proposed while the couple was visiting the country for his 40th birthday trip, leaving his partner “shocked”—”I had no idea,” Moskowitz adds.

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This is super sweet.

“I’m a massive planner and also have Midwest kind of values-ish,” the Ohio-born Todd shares. “So I asked Joe’s parents, made sure they were okay with it, talked to his family. I felt like I was taking the right steps. It was in planning for about 12 months prior to the trip.”

It was a rainy, foggy day in Thailand, but the couple says the moment couldn’t have been better. They captured the magic in some adorable photos on their Instagrams:

Moskowitz is the head of business development for a commercial real estate tech platform, while Todd is a senior director of new business for a marketing tech start-up. As luck would have it, their office building were right next to one another, and the found themselves working out at the same neighboring gym during lunch hour.

So, yeah, they met at a gym. “I know, eye roll,” Moskowitz jokes.

“After throwing eyes at each other for months, I got up the courage and introduced myself to Joe,” Todd says to EW in a separate interview.

“We met in the summer of 2019, right before New York Pride, actually. It’s kind of a funny story,” Ian reveals to Out. “I was having my ‘hot girl summer’ and my best friends were coming in to stay with me in New York. It was my first New York Pride being a resident in the city. But I met [Moskowitz] at the gym literally a week leading up to Pride. So when he was tagging along with me everywhere for every moment of the day during every Pride event, my best friends were not terribly happy that he was with us everywhere we went. But it all ended well!”

Their return to Thailand aside, The Amazing Race really is a full-circle moment for the newlyweds, who both claim to have been big fans of the show even before they met—in fact, it was something they bonded over in the early days of the relationship, especially in lockdown during the early days of COVID-19.

“What we weren’t on the same page about were who would do what challenges,” Moskowitz explains. “Even before we kicked off the process of getting on [The Amazing Race], we were talking about that. Who would do what, who’s better at which challenge. As we watched it, we were already kind of strategizing around what we would do.”

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Next thing they knew, they were scrambling across the map as contestants on The Amazing Race Season 35. After all, what better way to test the strength of your relationship than traveling through a new country where neither of you can speak the native language?

We’re certainly eager to see where the journey—both in life and on reality TV—takes Moskowitz and Todd next! Scroll below to see a few more of our favorite shots from their Instagram pages:

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