Nikki Garcia is indeed single — but she’s not quite ready to mingle.
“I’m single,” Garcia, 42, proclaimed on the Wednesday, April 8, episode of the “Angie Martinez IRL” podcast. “Well, the good thing is I love being single. I just love my space, I love how I do my routine and I love my aesthetic of my home now. It’s me and my son.”
The WWE star shares 5-year-old son Matteo with her ex-husband, Artem Chigvintsev. (Garcia and Chigvintsev, 43, were married from 2022 to 2024 and now coparent Matteo.)
“I just love all the things and I couldn’t imagine someone in that space now, and I love the peacefulness of it,” Garcia acknowledged of trying to date as a single mom. “I think it’s [because] I’m busy and my son’s 5, so I’m in it as a mom. It just seems, like, ‘Add it to the list.’ It’s not a fun thing.”
Garcia further speculated that her hesitancy to dip her toe back into the dating pool is, in part, because she hasn’t “met the person who’s made [her] want to make space yet.”
“It just seems like it’s slim pickings out there if you want like a man man,” she quipped, stressing that dating isn’t high on her priorities at the moment. “I haven’t [put effort in]. … I just want a cowboy. He doesn’t have to look like a cowboy but I need, like, a man like a cowboy.”
According to Garcia, she is looking for a partner who can make her “feel feminine.”
“You need to have rugged hands, not a better manicure than me,” Nikki mused of her dating wish list, joking that her twin, Brie Bella, knows what she wants and is angling to set her up on dates.
As Nikki embraces the single life post-divorce, she sparked dating speculation with Philadelphia Eagles athlete Cooper DeJean late last year.
“They have hung out,” a source exclusively told Us in January, stating that Nikki is “having fun and enjoying being single.”
Two months later, Nikki told Us that it was “difficult” seeing so much speculation and interest in her love life.
“It’s been crazy,” she told Us in an exclusive interview last month. “It’s difficult, because what I’ve realized is dating in the public eye, you can have, like, a date with someone, and then everyone’s like, ‘She’s with this person. They’ve been together forever.’ Sometimes [I’m] like, ‘Can I just have fun and it just be fun?’”
While Nikki isn’t ready to date just yet, she’s focused on raising her son.
“We coparent beautifully, and I get so many compliments on how happy and loving my son is,” Nikki said on Thursday, addressing where she stands with Chigvintsev. “You would never think he came from a divorced family at all.”
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