Picking up the pieces. Nikki Bella put love on the backburner after her split from John Cena and almost let something special pass her by — a relationship with Artem Chigvintsev.
The Total Bellas star, 36, shared via Instagram on Saturday, March 28, that she’s excited to take her fans behind the scenes of her reality show so they can see the special bond between her and Chigvintsev, 37.
“They say love conquers all … and it sure does. So many people in the beginning said it was just lust, my feelings weren’t real, it was just the dance, the infatuation, the mystery of this person, but I knew & felt it was always more. I listened to my heart, my soul, my body, I knew deep down that this was God’s gift, his answered prayer,” Bella captioned a photo of herself and her fiancé on Dancing With the Stars.
She added, “When I finally got the chance, & maybe because I was so broken, I tried to fight a very powerful love, deny it, walk away from it, & yet this beautiful gift of love wouldn’t let me walk away, this love that I always wanted. Now I didn’t expect to get so much of what I had been praying for in a year lol but I finally opened up my eyes, my heart, & accepted this beautiful gift.”
Bella and Cena, 42, began dating in 2012 before the Blockers star proposed to her at Wrestlemania 33 in April 2017. Us Weekly broke the news that the pair broke off their engagement one year later. The former couple briefly rekindled their romance a few weeks later before they called it quits again in July 2018.
The retired wrestler told Us at the time that she called off their engagement to “work on our relationship” but after “much time and soul-searching alone” realized that it was best for them to part ways.
Bella met Chigvintsev in 2017 when they were partners on season 25 of Dancing With the Stars. Us confirmed in January 2019 that the twosome were dating just six months after Bella’s split from Cena. One year later, the couple revealed that they had gotten secretly engaged in France in November 2019. Two months later, the reality star announced that she and Chigvintsev are expecting their first child together.
Cena, for his part, is dating engineer Shay Shariatzadeh. The professional wrestler was first spotted with Shariatzadeh in March 2019, eight months after his breakup from Bella.
