On the latest After the Bell, Otis revealed the inspiration for his current romance angle with Mandy Rose and how people thought they were married in real life because of a social media post. The two have been working on Smackdown in a romance angle that took a bad turn for Otis on Friday’s Valentine’s Day episode of Smackdown when Dolph Ziggler interjected himself once again.

You can see highlights from the discussion below, as well as the full podcast:

On where the inspiration for the angle came from: “I just would do like, if the fans have ever seen Tommy Boy where he talks to the girls by the pool, like ‘Hey, you know where the weight room is?’ I would just be joking. Because honestly, when I used to see pretty girls I used to be super duper shy and not say a word to them. I’d be a little nervous and I just couldn’t talk normally without stuttering. So nowadays, you know, you get a little more confidence as you get older.

“But I just — it’s Mandy, you know? She grew up with brothers, she’s awesome. The fans always ask me, ‘How’s she behind the curtain?’ And I say, ‘She’s awesome. She jokes around, you know. So it started with me, I started doing the Chris Farley stuff to her at the Performance Center. Like she’d walk by, I’d go, ‘Hey, how’re you doing, my beautiful peach?’ And I’d call like, Sonya, I called her my plum. Then coach Sara Amato goes, ‘We need everyone to have a fruit nickname.’ I go, ‘Well, that’s hard to do,’ because we’d call her a banana, or a strawberry, something in between there. It got out of hand, but I was pretty good at nicknames.”

On a social media post he made about Mandy that blew up: “Then just one day, I was sitting down. And she was posting all of her beautiful pictures online, I said, ‘What if I post a picture of her modeling pics, and say,’ ‘You look great babe?” And pretty soon that one post, there was comments than actual likes, because there was so many people that was just confused as to what was going on.

“And then a week later on Google, it said — when you typed in Otis, it would say, ‘Otis and Mandy, are they really married?,’ or something like that on the search bar [autocomplete]. I’m like, ‘Oh man this is kind of getting a little attention here.’ So I just kept on trying to be like pretend creeping. Kind of just posting here on a post saying, ‘Hey, you look great in this.’ I would pretend she was my girlfriend. But it was was obvious at the time, that she’s not, you know what I mean? It was just kind of a thing I was goofing around with. And we finally got it going on in the WWE world. And she’s awesome to work with too man. We have a blast, so it’s basically working for free.”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit WWE’s After the Bell with a h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.