Actor and wrestler John Cena met his wife, Shay Shariatzadeh Cena, at a bar while watching the Super Bowl.
Cena is squaring off against Brock Lesnar in WWE’s Wrestlelapooza 2025 event on ESPN on September 20. That has a lot of fans wondering whether he is married. The answer is that, yes, Cena is married, for the second time.
- Cena married Shay Cena, an engineer who was born in Iran, in October 2020 at a Florida attorney’s office.
- They held a second wedding celebration in Vancouver two years later.
- They have been together since at least March 2019, according to People.
Cena was previously married to his first wife Elizabeth Huberdeau, but they divorced in 2012.
John Cena Said He Wasn’t Looking for Love When He Met His Future Wife, Shay Cena
Cena opened up about the marriage on an episode of the Howard Stern show, revealing that he met his future wife in a British Columbia bar during Super Bowl LIII, which featured the New England Patriots.
“I wasn’t looking, but d***, man, it just found me,” Cena told Stern. “So we watched the game, and then the table sitting right across from us — this group of five people walked in,” he said. “Man, I stopped watching the game. I didn’t even know it was over.” He told Stern that he was afraid to approach Shariatzadeh.
A member of her party asked Cena for a photo, and he asked Shariatzadeh for her phone number, Cena told Stern, adding that he texted her that night, writing, “It was so nice to meet you, you’re beautiful, I’d like to get to know you more if you have any free time coming up I’ll make time for you.”
John Cena Says That People Need to Realize They Are ‘Worthy of Love’
The year before his fateful meeting with Shay, Cena and his fiancee Nikki Bella ended their relationship.
Cena has shared his thoughts on love and relationships on X. “When we understand that we are good enough as we are and we are worthy of love, the power that anyone thinks they have to change that perspective exists only because of our allowance,” he wrote in March 2025.
Shariatzadeh has worked for prominent companies.
Photo by Ray Tang/Anadolu via Getty Images
Eight years ago, a post on LinkedIn from the company Agigilon showcased Shariatzadeh, saying, “Avigilon’s Shay Shariatzadeh, Product Specialist, gives a demonstration on how to use the Avigilon Control Center Client to view live and recorded footage captured by the new Avigilon H4 Fisheye camera.”
Now known as Shay Cena, her LinkedIn page says, “I love technology and people! I excel at building rapport with customers, determining market needs and translating those into engineering requirements so we can build successful products that people love.”
According to LinkedIn, her most recent job was working for Microsoft as a program manager, a position that she left in 2021. Before that, she worked as a senior product manager for Sonatype in data integration; as a product manager for Motorola Solutions in Vancouver; as an applications and electrical engineer for Alpha Technologies LTD. in Vancouver; and as an engineering peer advisor at the University of British Columbia.
She also worked as a sales associate for Guess years ago. She has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of British Columbia.
“I worked with Shay during nearly 4 years in Avigilon,” a former co-worker wrote in a LinkedIn recommendation on her page. “She is a bright electrical engineer who displayed key features as a product manager: active & interacting listening, and properly translating customer requests into actionable info for product designers and development engineers.
