Pixabay DWTS pro and wife had an unexpected incident at their wedding.
Former “Dancing With the Stars” competitor Nikki Bella and her husband, ballroom pro Artem Chigvintsev, got married in Paris in August 2022.
The couple had been planning an elaborate wedding in the States but made a sort of last minute decision to have a destination wedding, which they discuss on their wedding special, “Nikki Bella Says I Do.”
Although they only had a couple of weeks to plan, Chigvintsev and Bella knew a few things for certain. They wanted their families present and they wanted their son, Matteo, to serve as their ring bearer. Unfortunately, the latter of those two things didn’t happen because the toddler ended up getting sick.
Here’s what you need to know:
Nikki Bella & Artem Chigvintsev Didn’t Know Matteo Wasn’t Going to Be in the Wedding Until They Were Already at the Ceremony
After arriving in Paris, Matteo came down with some sort of tummy bug, prohibiting him from attending his parents’ wedding ceremony. In an interview with E!, Chigvintsev joked that his son got “too excited” about his ring bearer duties.
“He was throwing up,” Bella elaborated. “The Nutcracker plays and we’re like looking down the aisle, and I’m like, ‘Where is he?’ And I feel just his hand like this, and my brother’s like, ‘Here’s the rings. Matteo’s vomiting. Just, you know, continue to get married,'” she explained. “I think I turned white.”
Bella and Chigvintsev were both sad that their son wasn’t at the ceremony.
“We both don’t even remember the ring part because we both kept looking at each other like, ‘Are we terrible parents, like putting our rings on and we were just told our son is vomiting in the back?'” she recalls wondering.
“[Matteo] ended up throwing up and he went back to the hotel, and he actually ended up being okay. But I’m sad we don’t have that moment,” she added.
Nikki Bella & Artem Chigvintsev Originally Postponed Their Wedding
Before deciding to get married in Paris, Bella and Chigvintsev were forced to postpone their wedding. Shortly after getting engaged, Bella found out that she was pregnant. Between a newborn, the pandemic, Chigvintsev’s work schedule and the Bellas Hall of Fame induction, a wedding just wasn’t practical, as Bella explained on “Nikki Bella Says I Do.”
In an interview with Brides, Bella further explained why she and Chigvintsev chose Paris for their wedding location.
“Artem and I went to Paris on a secret vacation when we were first dating and didn’t want the world to know we were a couple yet,” she recalls. “After that, we always said, ‘Run away to Paris with me.’ It’s always held a special place in our hearts, and when Napa wasn’t working out, we were like, ‘We just need to run away to Paris. Let’s make it work.’ It was literally a fairy-tale ending,” she explained.
Months after Bella and Chigvintsev’s wedding, there was some chatter that their union wasn’t legal in the U.S., but Bella cleared those rumors up.
“We’re legally married in France and in the United States. I think because we have our [marriage records] confidential … people went and searched and they didn’t find it,” she told Us Weekly.
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