Christina Carano is known mainly for two things: marrying singer Jason Mraz in 2015, and being the ex-wife he later credited with giving him the words to describe his own sexuality. Before any of that, she owned a coffee shop in Hermosa Beach, California. She used to open it at 4:30 in the morning. Mraz, a touring musician she had just met there, was usually still up at that hour back then, coming off a night instead of starting a day.
It’s one of the few details about their life together that Carano has put in her own words, from a single interview she gave in 2015, two months before the wedding. She has said very little publicly since. Mraz, meanwhile, has talked about their marriage and their divorce, and has credited her with something far more personal: the words he uses to describe his own sexuality.
Fast facts
- Full name: Christina Carano, nickname “Tina”
- Married Jason Mraz on October 25, 2015, in Mechanicsville, Virginia
- Divorce announced June 22, 2023
- Career: art director and film producer, credited on The Confession (2010) and Mother Trucker (in pre-production)
- No children
Table of Contents
Meeting at a Coffee Shop in Hermosa Beach
Carano grew up in Royal Oak, Michigan, before moving to Southern California. By 2007 she owned a coffee shop in Hermosa Beach, and that is where she met Mraz. Both were seeing other people at the time. Mraz got engaged to fellow singer-songwriter Tristan Prettyman in 2010, an engagement that lasted about six months before it ended. Once they were both single again, in 2011, Carano and Mraz started dating.
The clearest picture of how they felt about those early years comes from a joint profile the two of them gave to The Osider, a small magazine covering Oceanside, California, in August 2015. Mraz said he liked her from the day they met and had hoped, even while seeing someone else, that he would find a woman like her again. Carano said she had noticed him for years before either of them acted on it.
The Wedding in Mraz’s Hometown
Mraz and Carano married on October 25, 2015, at the Historic Polegreen Church in Mechanicsville, Virginia, the town where Mraz grew up. About 50 family members and friends attended the outdoor ceremony. Terces Engelhart, who founded the vegan restaurant chain Cafe Gratitude, officiated. Mraz posted a single photo from the day and wrote that he had been made “the luckiest man in the world.”
The couple settled into a life built around the farm Mraz kept in Oceanside, growing avocados and coffee. In that same Osider interview, Carano talked about the roles they had settled into at home. He grew the food, she cooked it. She said she believed home cooking mattered in a culture that had mostly moved past it. They never had children.
The Word She Gave Him
In June 2018, Billboard published a Pride Month letter in which Mraz wrote about his own sexuality for the first time. He later said he had had relationships with men during the years he and Carano were dating, before they married, and that it left him wondering, at first, if that made him gay.
Carano is the one who gave him a way to make sense of it, according to Mraz. He has said she used the term “two-spirit,” a word some Native American cultures use for a person who can love both men and women, and that hearing it gave him language that felt right. He told Billboard this in 2018, and told GLAAD close to the same story again in 2023.
Carano has never used the term publicly herself. She has not confirmed the story or added anything to it. Her only interview, the single 2015 conversation with The Osider, took place three years before any of this became known, and it was about coffee and farming, not sexuality. What is known about her side of it comes entirely from him.
Why the Marriage Ended
Mraz confirmed the marriage was over on June 22, 2023, at a rooftop party for his eighth album, Mystical Magical Rhythmical Radical Ride, held at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles the night before the record came out. He told the crowd he had kept the split private at first out of respect for Carano, who had never been comfortable with public attention.
He returned to the subject months later in an interview with GLAAD, timed to his spot on the organization’s Out100 list. He described the divorce as something that forced him to sit with guilt and shame before he could fully accept his own bisexuality. The marriage had lasted eight years.
Christina Carano’s Work in Film
Carano has a career of her own in film, separate from anything to do with Mraz. IMDb credits her as art director on a 2010 short called The Confession, directed by Maris Lidaka, a small production not to be confused with the better known, Oscar-nominated British short of the same name and year.
Fifteen years later, Deadline reported that a road comedy called Mother Trucker grew out of an idea Carano developed with writers Susan Anlage and Alyson Granaderos. Sarah Ann Masse wrote the eventual script, and comedian Amber Ruffin, known for her work on Late Night with Seth Meyers, signed on to star and produce. Carano is credited as a producer alongside:
- Amber Ruffin, through her production banner Straight to Cards
- Night Fox Entertainment
- Zonino Productions
The film is currently listed in pre-production, a step further along than it was when Deadline first reported on it in September 2025.
That 2010 credit on The Confession came a year before Carano and Mraz started dating, and five years before they married. Fifteen years later came Mother Trucker. Those two credits are the only film work on record under her own name, apart from the marriage that most of her public recognition still traces back to.
