Maria Kanellis relishing her role in Ring of Honor

What a difference a couple of years makes.

In December of 2011, Maria Kanellis was set to make her Ring of Honor debut at the side of her boyfriend, Ring of Honor wrestler Michael Bennett.

Kanellis was a little more than a year removed from a notable run with WWE and was only supposed to be a one-time special attraction at Ring of Honor's Final Battle show.

A little more than two years later, Kanellis has become a mainstay in Ring of Honor and her boyfriend is now her fiancée.

"I absolutely love working for Ring of Honor," Kanellis said during an interview with philly.com. "It's just a treat being able to work my fiancée [Michael Bennett]."

Both Kanellis and Bennett will make yet another appearance in Ring of Honor this weekend, as the promotion will celebrate its 12th anniversary with shows on Friday and Saturday night in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania National Guard Armory at 2700 Southampton Road.

For more information on the shows, including HonorCon, click HERE.

Kanellis and Bennett are both well-established talents in Ring of Honor today, but Kanellis admitted that she wasn't completely sure how the fans would react to her and Bennett back in 2011.

Bennett was and still is a heel in Ring of Honor and had no problem getting people to boo him on a nightly basis. Kanellis said she had a good idea that the crowd would turn on her because of her association with Bennett, but wasn't completely sure.

It didn't take long for Kanellis to find out for herself.

"I walk through the curtain with Michael Bennett, there's a big cheer and within five seconds later they started booing me," she said. "It's all because who I'm managing and he's good at his job. He's such an incredible wrestler and nobody gives him credit for it."

"I knew it was going to happen," she added. I knew if I did my job right it was going to happen. I knew that Mike was hated enough that it was going to happen. No, it didn't surprise me. Yes, I loved every minute of it and yes I will continue to do exactly what I'm doing because it's the right way to do things."

Since that night in 2011, Kanellis has been building two things: her skills as Bennett's manager in the ring and her relationship with him outside of it.

In front of the cameras, Kanellis and Bennett are a power couple that isn't shy about telling people how great they are.

Bennett handles his business in the ring while Kanellis is cheering him on and drawing more heat from the fans outside of it.

But Kanellis knows that the show is all about Bennett and strives to make sure that he is the focal point. It's a skill that is necessary to be successful manager in wrestling — learning how to make the talent in the ring look like bigger stars.

Kanellis said she's learned this by watching her manager brethren with WWE's Zeb Colter and Paul Heyman being two of the main examples she follows.

"[Colter] is amazing," she said. "I don't agree with anything he says. I think that's the point."

"[Heyman] can tell you an entire story with just the way that he looks at whoever is in the ring with him or how he looks out at the crowd or how he looks at his hands or how he looks at a title, he tells an entire story," she added. "That is who I look up to. That is who I find incredible."

When the cameras are off, Kanellis makes sure that her relationship with Bennett is about more than just wrestling. To her, they're a normal couple that just so happens to work in the wrestling business instead of the other way around.

"For me, I can't see [wrestling] being too much in my life after the next 10 years other than if I was behind the scenes and for him it might be in his life for the next 20 years," she said. "But we're planning on being together for much longer than that."

While Kanellis is still apart of the wrestling business, however, she wants to see an evolution in women's wrestling, specifically in Ring of Honor.

While apart of WWE, Kanellis was a member of an entire division of female wrestlers — something Ring of Honor does not currently have.

The promotion has featured women's wrestling in the past, but not to the level of having an entire division with a champion. Kanellis hopes that she can facilitate such a move in the near future.

"If it's close to home and I can watch it right in front of me at Ring of Honor, if I can be apart of it, if I can stimulate women's wrestling by making another opportunity for women to get involved in Ring of Honor then that's what I want to see. Because right now Ring of Honor is the most important company to me and I think that it produces the best wrestling out there," Kanellis said.

"If I can bring in some of the best female talent in the world to come and work at Ring of Honor and wrestle at Ring of Honor then for me, that's the most important thing," she added. "I think that Ring of Honor has that platform to do that. I think that the bar is so very high and it just makes everybody work harder. Hopefully, that's the direction that we're moving in."

In the meantime, Kanellis is more than comfortable with her place in the professional wrestling business. Between traveling to shows, producing a podcast with Bennett and pursuing her associates degree in Art, there's a lot going on the world of Kanellis.

Time will tell how much will be different for her in the next two years.

For more information on Kanellis, visit her website Maria-Kanellis.org.

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Kanellis on her time in WWE

Kanellis made her debut in WWE as apart of the Divas Search in 2004. Her and the company parted ways in 2010.

During our conversation, she spoke openly about her time with the company.

Kanellis on the way she entered the company and learning the business as she went along:

"I don't really know how other women were looked at when they came into WWE. All I know was how I was looked at and my experience. My experience with WWE is that I came in bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and I had never experienced anything like that before. And all of a sudden I was on the grandest stage of them all in front of 20,000 people, doing WrestleMania in front of the millions and millions of people watching at home."

"Yes, it was hard and yes, I stepped on toes and I did the wrong thing, but it's made me stronger. There's no way that I would've been in wrestling for as long as I have if I came in any other way."

"There were sweet moments. There were moments when I would be talking at the curtain with Triple H and he'd be explaining to me what was happening or why this person was doing something a certain way or moments with Stephanie McMahon where she and I could have a conversation about the state of women's wrestling. There were moments when I would be training with Shelton Benjamin or Carlito in the ring and they'd be teaching me things. Another one that was great with me and Layla was William Regal."

Kanellis on what she thinks about her time there looking back at it today:

"Yes, it's tough, just like any other job on the planet, but I think now with my age and my maturity I understand it so much better than I did when first got out of WWE. To be honest, I wouldn't have it any other way."