(An abridged version of this story first appeared in today’s USA TODAY.)

There came a time early on in their romance when Bryan Caraway told Miesha Tate that she’d have to choose.

This was before they were even in the boyfriend-girlfriend realm, before either of them was signed to the UFC roster. This was back when they were just college students who shared a passion for mixed martial arts and the first hints of interest in one another.

They met when Tate (15-5 MMA, 2-2 UFC), then a freshman at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Wash., began attending practices at the school’s MMA club, led by Caraway (19-7 MMA, 4-2 UFC), a senior. Soon after that they began dating, but when Tate said she wanted to get serious about MMA and begin training with the competition team off-campus, Caraway put his foot down. He couldn’t be the captain of the team if he was also dating one of its female members, he told her. Tate would have to choose between him or MMA.

“I thought she’d pick me,” Caraway tells USA TODAY Sports and MMAjunkie. “I’m the cool senior guy at the college. Next thing you know, she shows up to practice. I’m like, what the heck?”

True to his word, Caraway ended their romantic involvement, but Tate kept coming to practices. Though she says now she was “pretty devastated” when Caraway ended things, she really did want to be a fighter, whether Caraway believed it or not.

“I think he wasn’t sure whether I was just trying to follow him around more,” Tate said. “Because I started going to the actual team practices, and that was not even at the college. It was like a half-hour drive away, so I was carpooling with all these guys, then training and getting beat up and then going home. He was like, ‘There’s no way this girl likes this.’”

But when presented with a choice between a boy she wanted to date and a sport she wanted to compete in, Tate said, “I chose the latter, even though I wanted both.”

It wasn’t until a year or so later that Caraway found himself looking over at her one day at practice and seeing not just some girl, but a capable fighter who had the same burning desire to win that he did. That’s when his stance on dating a team member first began to change.

“I was kind of old-fashioned,” Caraway said. “I don’t want to say I didn’t believe in women’s MMA, but it was kind of rough for me. She proved to me that they could be just as mentally strong and physically gifted as the male talent. She won me over.”

Still, there’s a reason most relationship experts wouldn’t recommend dating someone you work with. It’s hard enough when you share an office building with someone you love. It’s even harder when your office is a fight gym, and when your boyfriend is also the one who coached you since the start of your career.

That’s the part Tate and Caraway say is the hardest. When Tate enters full fight camp mode, as she has now for her bout against fellow women’s bantamweight contender Sara McMann at UFC 183 in January, she used to feel as though her coach was following her home at night. While they’d always been good at not bringing their personal lives into the gym, they weren’t so great at keeping the gym out of their personal lives.

“In the transition to training camps I felt like I would lose my partner, my boyfriend, and I felt like I just had another coach,” Tate said. “That was hard. We just had to really communicate and figure out why that was.”

One thing they figured out was that they needed help, which is where Xtreme Couture head coach Robert Follis comes in. The pair relocated to Las Vegas primarily to work with him, they say, since he seems to be the one man who knows just how to deal with them both.

For Tate, it allowed her to get her criticism from a source that made it easier to handle, and for Caraway it provided an opportunity to step back and support rather than to constantly push.

“We’d get out of the gym and I’d be still trying to coach at home and talk about things,” Caraway said. “We had to set the cup down, so to speak. You know, you can hold a cup of water, and it’s not heavy, but if you hold a cup of water still for six, seven, eight hours, it’s going to feel like a million pounds.”

While that aspect of their relationship has improved with the change in gyms, they said, one thing that’s hard to get used to is living their private lives in the public eye. Tate’s fans are many and they are largely male. A lot of them aren’t big fans of Caraway, and they don’t mind saying so.

“They want to see her with Brad Pitt or some god or something,” Caraway said. “Nothing’s good enough. I get the brunt of all these jokes or bashed on, because all these dudes wish they were with her. …People are just so rough sometimes. They treat you like you’re an item and not like a human being. It can be a little frustrating.”

As for Tate, she said she does her best not to let it get to her. Fans may have their opinions about who she should or shouldn’t be with, but every once in a while she has to remind herself that those people don’t actually know anything about her, or about Caraway.

“I’m not asking for anyone’s opinion,” Tate said. “I really don’t care what anyone has to say.”