WWE star Sonya Deville is engaged to her mom-of-two girlfriend
People magazine recently revealed that Dara Berenato (aka Sonya Deville) popped the question to her girlfriend Toni Cassano.
WWE star Daria Berenato is officially off the market, ladies! Berenato, 29, shared in an exclusive interview with People that she proposed to girlfriend and fitness expert Toni Cassano on the day after Valentine’s Day in a wine cellar in Towaco, NJ. But that wasn’t the end of the story. There was more!
“I proposed, then Toni’s like, ‘Grab my purse.’ And she pulls out a freaking ring box, and she’s like, ‘I’ve been carrying this around in my purse for four months. So whenever you proposed, I could give you a ring immediately back,’ ” Berenato shared.
Bernato revealed, “I could go on for days about the way I feel about this woman, I never knew love could feel so happy and safe all at the same time. I found my best friend, my soul mate and my life partner all in one incredible human. She is the epitome of my ride or die. To be able to show her and her two daughters how much they all mean to me was what this proposal was all about. They are my world and now we are one family forever together.”
The super-fit wrestler and clothing designer posted on her Instagram account on Valentine’s Day: “Happy Valentine’s Day to my forever valentine! I can’t even begin to tell you how much I love you. You are my rock. You keep our family together, functioning and fed and we love you more than anything . My Toni’s forevers💞💘💌”
She also posted a pic from the night of the proposal, which she called “surreal”.
Berenato says she spent months designing the ring before asking Cassano to marry her. “I’ve never proposed to a woman before and I wanted this to be the most special for Toni and for her kids too,” says the WWE star.
Cassano has two daughters, aged 7 and 11 and the couple met last April when Cassano agreed to meet Berenato at one of her shows. For Berenato, it was apparently love at first sight. “This is going to sound really cheesy, but I knew the second I saw her,” says Berenato, who first clapped eyes on the mom-of-two when she made her wrestling entrance, looked out into the crowd and saw Cassano sitting in the front row.
Berenato came out on television in 2015 and was the first openly gay female WWE wrestler to do so.
“It’s so cool to me to be in this position right now, to be engaged as a gay female in the WWE, and to have proposed to my fiancée. Because I look back at seven years ago, eight years ago when I wasn’t even openly out yet, and I was hiding relationships, and I was still trying to figure out my comfortability with being gay and who I was,” she says.
Now, she says, she feels like she has been embraced on her journey to self-acceptance and she is committed to showing that her fans can have that level of acceptance and self-love, too.
