If there was word to sum up January 2023 in celeb world, it would be polyamory.
From the reports that The Saturday’s Una Healy was in a thruple with boxer David Haye and his girlfriend, to Selena Gomez’s jokey Instagram announcement that she was dating both Nicola Peltz and her husband Brooklyn Beckham, it seems less and less people are happy with just one partner.
Including Carol Vorderman.
The 62-year-old recently appeared on Michelle Visage’s podcast and detailed how she’s living her best dating life at the moment.
When asked by Michelle if she was in a relationship, Carol confessed, ‘No! I'm having the best time. I've spoken about this once. I have a system which I've had for 10 years. They're called “special friends”.
‘One's 11 years, one's seven years, you know everyone is single. It's a happy place. I hasten to add I'm not into one-night stands.’
The former Countdown co-host continued, ‘The language around a woman of my generation is that if you had more than one partner when you got married you were this, you were that. Everything was derogatory about a woman, that was the environment I was growing up in. It was like "she's desperate", everything was judgmental.’
‘Well, you can take all that and you can throw it out the window, that's my polite way of saying it. There's no harm being done. It's a happy place to live. The only thing I was sold when I was young was a fairytale with a poor girl meets a prince they get married and they lived happily ever after.
‘This whole assumption: “Have you got a partner yet? Have you got a man?” Well, no, actually I've got five.’
Carol, who’s been married twice - first when she was 24 and then again at the age of 30 – previously opened up about her dating life on This Morning telling Alison Hammond and Dermot O’Leary, ‘I live my life in chapters, and [I lived] this chapter since I was about 50. For the last decade or so, I've lived a life which is much freer.
‘I've never felt freer. I have ignored the [concept of] looking for one person and I have a number of what I've called "special friends".’
The mother of two continued, ‘I don't really want to marry again. I don't really want to live with a man again, having to look after him all the time. But this is a time to break this nonsense taboo, which is a person should only be looking for one other person that satisfies everything in their life. That's hell.’
‘They don't know each other, but they know about it. It's a very honest relationship. One of them has gone on for many more years than my marriage - over ten years. Another is seven. He's an astronaut. He rang me from the space station.’
We’re with Carol! Enough of the stigma around dating, just enjoy it and do what works for you.