20-year-old: “People think my husband is my dad”
Beth Telford was just 16 when she got together with family friend Andy, who was then 44. Four years on, the couple are married with two children and defiant about their 28-year age gap...
hen Beth Telford fell for older W man Andy, she had no idea she would lose her friends and family and be forced to move away.
The couple were driven from their hometown in north Wales after Andy was dubbed a paedophile due to their 28-year age gap relationship – but the pair say they are blissfully happy.
Andy, 47, who speaks for both of them during our interview and has been married three times before, says, “I have got a stunningly beautiful, 20-year-old wife. People are just jealous of me.”
CONTROVERSY
The couple first met when Beth was 14 and Andy became friends with her mum – she hasn’t spoken to her father for six years. Beth started helping out at his courier firm and Andy swears he just saw her as “one of the lads” who worked there. But a week after her 16th birthday, Beth asked him out.
Beth, now a stay-at-home mum, says, “There wasn’t a moment when I suddenly realised I fancied him. It was just a feeling I got, which was hard to ignore. It seemed so right.”
Andy recalls, “I’d never looked at her in that way at all. When she asked me out I actually ran to the loo and talked to my father. He’s 84 and his wife is in her mid 40s, and when they’d got together I’d encouraged it, saying if it makes you happy then do it. He said the same to me, so I went back and said ‘yes’. I saw her with new eyes once she asked me out, then I saw her as a woman.”
The couple’s relationship swiftly progressed, and they moved in together after just a few weeks. When family and friends found out, they were horrified, including Beth’s mum – who they haven’t spoken to since. The couple got engaged after a year, when she was just 17, and she fell pregnant with son Timmy before they got married.
It was after Beth was verbally abused while out shopping when Timmy, now two, was just a baby that they decided they had to move away from north Wales to Burnley.
Andy says, “I’d had paedophile written on my work van and Beth was called a sl*g by acquaintances. She shrugged it off, but I couldn’t have our children growing up in that environment.”
NO REGRETS
After moving, the couple got married in November 2016. The only family there was Andy’s brother and a handful of friends who they’ve barely seen since. But the couple insist they have no regrets, and they now have a second son, Conwy, one.
Andy, a coach driver, says, “We are each other’s best friend and we don’t need other people. We have loads in common, we like watching all the reality TV shows and soaps together. We’ve never had an argument. It’s the happiest I’ve ever been.”
Beth echoes this sentiment, saying, “He calls me beauty and I call him my teddy bear. He’s my best friend.”
The couple admit that even since moving away people stare at them and, when they’re out together, Andy will almost always be mistaken for her dad.
Andy says, “Depending on our mood we will play up to it when people are staring. I’ve been known to pull Beth onto my knee and say, ‘Come to daddy now’ and then give her a huge snog! I don’t understand why people see it as a big deal.”
The couple aren’t worried about what the future might hold. Andy says, “Life is short and you don’t know what’s round the corner. We are living day by day – very happily.”