Like any celebrity, professional wrestlers often have to walk a tightrope between their public personas and their personal lives. There are certain factors that make this balance particularly precarious for people in the business. There’s the matter of kayfabe, and that despite most fans understanding wrestling is a work now, outsiders can still have a hard time parsing real personalities from what they see on screen.

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Moreover, there’s life on the road that sees a lot of wrestlers either live most of their lives away from their romantic partners if they’re not in wrestling, or else see their partners constantly if they’ve formed relationships within the locker room. Over the years, a number of instances of infidelity have blown up into very public issues.

10 Shawn Michaels Has Some Sunny Days

One of the most infamous incidents in making the real-life professional rivalry between Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels quite personal came when Michaels cut a promo on Raw referencing The Hitman having “some Sunny days.” He implied Hart was sleeping with Sunny, who was attached to her on-screen partner Skip. More to the point, the comments caused issues in Hart’s own already rocky marriage. In his book, he admitted to infidelity, but the claims about him and Sunny had no truth to them.

All the more maddening, Sunny has spoken in years to follow about her and HBK actually being the ones who were having an affair behind the scenes.

9 Life Imitates Art For Triple H And Stephanie McMahon

Late 1999 saw Triple H and Stephanie McMahon become an on-screen couple in WWE. The timeline of their relationship--how and when their kayfabe pariing gave way to real feelings between them--has always been a little fuzzy.

Included in that fuzziness are questions about how that timeline lined up with The Game’s real life relationship with Chyna. While the version of the story WWE has typically peddled would suggest Helmsley started seeing McMahon shortly after he and Chyna split, there’s a great deal of conjecture that he was actually cheating on The Ninth Wonder of the World with the boss’s daughter. In either case, the coupling of Triple H and McMahon seemed to contribute to Chyna’s profound discontent at the time and her ultimately not re-signing with WWE.

8 Vince McMahon’s Exploits

Vince McMahon played a lascivious enough character on screen over the years that it wasn’t exactly surprisingg to long-time fans when word emerged over the summer of 2022 about his extramarital affairs.

The cheating scandal rocked WWE for a time, ithough, including McMahon’s temporary retirement due to allegations he’d used company funds as “hush money” to keep women he had engaged with or harassed quiet about their interactions. His wife, Linda, didn’t say much at the time, though her comments may have shed some new light on the story of their marriage, as she suggested she wasn’t entirely shocked and that her husband would have to deal with the consequences of his own decisions.

7 An Affair Paves The Way To Bray Wyatt’s Family Life

In 2017, Bray Wyatt was coming into his own as a WWE Superstar, including winning his first WWE Championship. His personal life came to forefront, though, when word got out that despite being married to another woman, he was romantically linked to WWE ring announcer JoJo Offerman.

While the affair was a scandal in the moment, things have settled down now. More than Wyatt and Offerman hooking up, they’ve developed a family life together, having two children of their own and announcing their engagement in 2022.

6 The Lita-Matt Hardy-Edge Triangle

Lita and Matt Hardy were one of the best-known and most popular real-life couples in WWE during the Attitude Era when fans cheered them on as two-thirds of Team Xtreme on air. However, things took an ugly turn in 2005.

Details remain sketchy to the public about whether Edge and Lita actually had an affair, or a close bond and emotional connection that didn’t quite cross that line. Regardless, a very public breakup between Hardy and Lita followed after he discovered text messages between the two. WWE made an unpopular decision in releasing Hardy in order to maintain order, but rehired him shortly thereafter. It was a credit to all three that they were professional enough to work a two-month angle coming out of their real life issues.

5 Things Get Messy With John Cena And Mickie James

John Cena embarked on his WWE career attached to his high school sweetheart Elizabeth Huberdeau, whom he married in 2009. While Cena kept that part of his life private, it’s been widely rumored that his infidelity was a major contributor to the marriage falling apart.

In particular, word is that he engaged in a brief affair with Mickie James. This was while she was attached to Kenny Dykstra which led to backstage political issues as Cena garnered more and more influence as he shored up his spot as the face of WWE.

4 Jeff Jarrett And Karen Angle

In 2008 Kurt Angle and his then-wife Karen filed for divorce. In 2009, it came into the public eye that Karen was romantically attached to Angle’s TNA coworker, Jeff Jarrett. The two announced their engagement in 2009 and were wedded in 2010.

RELATED: The Awkward Relationship Between Kurt Angle, Jeff Jarrett and Karen Jarrett, ExplainedThe short timeline between marriages led to a great deal of speculation that about infidelity within the Angle marriage, and indeed this became part of an angle between Jarrett and Angle during their TNA feud. Most recently the love triangle was brought back to light in a rap by Max Caster when his tag team The Acclaimed feuded with Jarrett.

3 Woman Leaves Kevin Sullivan

One of the more fascinating life imitating art situations in wrestling came up in the mid-1990s. At a key point in Kevin Sullivan's WCW career, when he was both the booker and an in-ring talent, he crafted an angle in which his real-life wife Nancy left him for Chris Benoit. That became one of the key points of tension in a heated feud between the men. He has discussed in interviews that he went so far as to implore them to be physically affectionate with each other in public, even well away from any wrestling arena, to sell onlookers on the idea the affair was real.

Nancy did wind up leaving Kevin for Benoit in real life. While the men saw through their feud, it seemed there was some real life tension. That included Benoit asking for his release immediately upon winning the WCW Championship, because he didn’t want to work under Kevin as the head booker when he got that job back in early 2000.

2 The Batista-Melina Affair

In the thick of the Ruthless Aggression Era, Batista and Melina had a brief relationship, the terms of which remain muddy to this day. The most innocent version of the story would suggest that shortly after Batista’s divorce and while Melina and John Morrison were temporarily broken up, Melina and Batista had their time together.

Other versions of the story suggest Batista cheated on his wife with Melina, and that Melina may have either cheated on Morrison, or that Morrison may have given her a “hall pass” to fool around with The Animal. The most official version of the story is probably what Batista wrote in his book, which suggests there was no infidelity on anyone’s part, but the rumor mill never settled down entirely on a potential scandal.

1 Social Media Tells The Tale For Seth Rollins

Early 2015 saw a wild series of events unfold around Seth Rollins. His social media was purportedly hacked, resulting in his account posting a revealing photo of NXT prospect Zahra Schreiber, whom he was seeing at the time. Unfortunately for Rollins, his relationship with Schreiber had been a secret, because he was also engaged to a woman named Leighla Schultz. To make matters worse, ill-advised settings on WWE’s part fed the pictures from Twitter straight to their website.

RELATED: The Visionary: 10 Backstage Stories About Seth Rollins WWE Fans Should Know AboutSchultz retaliated by posting nude photos of Rollins himself. This all happened in a whirlwind while The Architect held the Money in the Bank briefcase, and introduced questions about whether WWE might pull the plug on his main event push, if not cut ties with him altogether. Fortunately, things cooled off after the initial storm. Rollins and Schreiber broke up, and the World Heavyweight Champion is now, by all accounts, happily married to Becky Lynch.