John Cena Says He and Wife Shay Shariatzadeh Are Private to Protect 'Her Safety and Wellbeing'

John Cena and Shay Shariatzadeh met in 2019 and have been married since October 2020

John Cena values his privacy with wife Shay Shariatzadeh.

At the top of Cena's appearance on the April 8 episode of Dax Shepard's Armchair Expert podcast, the actor and professional wrestler, 46, said he and Shariatzadeh largely keep to themselves because he values "her safety and wellbeing."

Cena married Shariatzadeh, an Iranian-born engineer who he met in 2019, in October 2020.

"One of the promises I made to her on the altar was, 'I will never put you or I'll do my best to not put you in an undue harm's way,' " he said of the couple's wedding vows. "So a lot of it is just about genuine safety. And it's not to say that everyone out there has bad intentions or we'd ever run into someone bad, but you also never know when someone feels threatened."

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"If my wife, who is my travel partner and partner in life, now feels unsafe or uncomfortable in all these new places we go, I got another hurdle to climb in my personal life," he added. "It's just an exercise in the strength of boundaries and the value of boundaries."

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Cena and Shariatzadeh began dating about one year after Cena and his ex-fiancée, Nikki Bella, called off their wedding in 2018. During an appearance on SiriusXM's The Howard Stern Show in February, Cena recalled that he and Shariatzadeh met while he was watching Super Bowl LIII on Feb. 3, 2019 at a bar in Vancouver with a friend.

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"I was such a dick, I was so bad. Here I am — hell this was half a decade [ago] — I'm 40 and I'm too scared to approach this girl," he recalled at the time, after noting that Shariatzadeh captured his attention as soon as she entered the bar he was in. The couple later got engaged sometime around Valentine's Day 2020, after Cena finished filming his part in the 2021 movie The Suicide Squad, as he recounted on Stern's talk show.

During that appearance, Cena added he "would have [proposed in three months," when asked about when he knew he wanted to marry Shariatzadeh."It might have been a little weird, yes," he said. "I don't want to speak for her, but she didn't say no when I asked."

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