“It’s helped us tremendously,” the reality star, 37, exclusively told Us Weekly earlier this month while discussing the launch of her Tearless baby haircare line with sister Brie Bella. “We don’t even have to keep going because it’s — I mean, it’s good to always have checkups — but all of a sudden, our sessions turned into, like, you just sit there. You’re like, ‘Oh, I’m really loving right now. Like, there’s no problems.’ It’s like we didn’t know what to talk about.”

Nikki noted that her issues with the 38-year-old Dancing With the Stars pro stemmed from misunderstandings about parenting son Matteo, 7 months.

“For Artem and I, and I think for new parents, I think anyone that’s been in this situation, it’s hard for the guy to understand what us women are going through and us women don’t always — I know my situation. I don’t tell him how I’m feeling. I just assume that he should know. And he’s this guy, like, ‘I have no idea what she’s feeling and now she’s upset at me,’” she recalled. “And I just realized [it was] miscommunication. We used to have an amazing foundation of communication and we lost that when Matteo came, and it’s both of our faults in different ways — me for not communicating and Artem for not asking. And it was so amazing when we started to realize that.”

Nikki and Chigvintsev have since recovered and figured out how to discuss things as they come up. “Now, like, how we communicate when we both feel a certain way or anything with Matteo, we appreciate each other now in a certain way,” she revealed. “Even last night, like, I knew Matteo, he doesn’t cry anymore through the night, but I was like, ‘He just needs a bottle,’ and Artem’s like, ‘Maybe he needs to go back to sleep.’ And we realized he was hungry. And I was like, ‘You just have to know that sometimes mom intuition kicks in and we just know,’ and he goes, ‘You’re totally right. I will always go with mom intuition from now on.’ And so, [it’s] cool how things have changed.”

The Total Bellas star exclusively told Us in November 2020 that she and the professional dancer planned to attend couples therapy after he wrapped season 29 of Dancing With the Stars. “It’s with our life coach,” she said at the time. “After Dancing, we’re going to start classes as a couple because we’ve realized that we both feel like we’re not listening to each other. … We finally both just said, like, ‘We need to bring someone in to help us so we don’t get [back] into that place.’”

Distance demanded by his role on the ABC competition series did not make the situation any easier. “I would be lying to say, ‘Oh, it’s great.’ It has definitely been a struggle for us,” she confessed. “It’s hard. We have so many ups and downs. It’s been so difficult on our relationship because I need so much from him, but he’s, like, torn between his job that requires so much from him and then us at home.”

Nikki and Chigvintsev got engaged in November 2019 and welcomed Matteo in July 2020.

With reporting by Christina Garibaldi

This story originally appeared on: US Magazine - Author:Erin Crabtree