John Cena and Nikki Bella kiss on ‘SmackDown Live.’ (WWE.com)
At WrestleMania 33 on Sunday night, John Cena proposed to Nikki Bella. Is this real? Are they actually getting married? Or is this a scripted storyline?
As far as we have been made aware, this marriage between Cena and Bella is totally real. It is not simply an example of their characters getting married for the show like when Triple H and Stephanie McMahon got “married” on Raw in 1999 (although they would later legitimately get married in real life).
John Cena and Nikki Bella really are in a relationship off-camera, but some fans have speculated that the two of them got engaged long ago and that this whole proposal at WrestleMania was just a stunt. There’s not that much concrete evidence to back that up, but one would think that Cena wouldn’t want his actual, legitimate proposal to the love of his life to be so heavily telegraphed for months in advance.
On Total Divas and Total Bellas, the E! reality shows that revolve around WWE superstars, John Cena repeatedly stated that he did not want to get married. The reason given was that Cena does not want to have kids while Bella does.
“Would I love to marry you? Absolutely. I love you,” Cena said on an episode of Total Divas. “…What I’m afraid of, and this is the one thing I’m very much afraid of, if we were to get married tomorrow, and then you come to the conclusion that you want children, you know where I stand. In no way would I ask you to sacrifice anything for me.”
In another episode of the show, Cena told Bella that he feels like there is a time bomb over his head because he knows that Bella wants children.
And indeed, in interviews, Nikki Bella has reiterated that she wants to have children and that she hopes John Cena will change his mind.
“I wanna know that there’s going to be a chance that there could be one day that, it is Mr. and Mrs. Cena, or there might be a chance that one day, we do have a kid,” she told E! Online. “I know this is probably going to be a tough conversation, but I gotta just voice myself. I gotta just tell him how I feel.”
Cena said in an April 2016 interview with Rolling Stone that he loves kids but he knows he could not handle raising one.
“I’ve been upfront about this,” Cena said. “I just have things I need to get done. It’s not negotiable. We’ve been to therapy over it. I don’t think it will ever be over with…I don’t want kids, I don’t want marriage. That’s me just saying, ‘Hey, this is my life and this is how I’m going to live.’”
John Cena confirmed in an interview with Today on Monday morning that he has changed his mind about all of this, with the reason being that he met the perfect person. He also said that he had been planning to propose since January 2016.
This certainly makes it sound like John Cena was lying when he said throughout 2016 that he didn’t want to get married, as by that point, he had already personally decided he was going to propose to Nikki Bella.
Throughout John Cena’s recent feud with The Miz, The Miz repeatedly mocked Nikki Bella for wanting John Cena to propose to her even though Cena had said he would not do so. In a recurring joke on the past two episodes of SmackDown Live, The Miz portrayed John Cena and Maryse portrayed Nikki Bella in a “deleted scene” from Total Bellas, and The Miz as John Cena repeatedly pretended he was about to propose to Maryse as Bella, only for it to be revealed that she was just misinterpreting his words.
When John Cena and Nikki Bella were on Today last week, they were asked about the rumors surrounding a WrestleMania proposal, and John Cena became very visibly uncomfortable, as if he was upset that a surprise had been ruined.
Stay tuned for more information about the real-life wedding between John Cena and Nikki Bella.