Love films have actually put me off marriage, says Allsopp
WITH a back catalogue including Love Actually, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, Richard Curtis’s films usually inspire romantic feelings in others.
But the film director has actively put Kirstie Allsopp off getting married, she has said.
Allsopp, the broadcaster, has told how her neighbours Curtis and his partner Emma Freud persuaded her not to marry, admitting the decision is the only “unconventional” thing in her life.
Saying she and her partner Ben Andersen, a property developer, are “happy” as they are, Allsopp argued the modern trend for “overblown, vastly expensive weddings” was worrying.
“We don’t feel the need to marry,” she told Prima magazine. “For which I partly blame our next-door neighbours Emma Freud and Richard Curtis, who have never done it either. “Like them, we’re happy as we are. “The current trend for overblown, vastly expensive weddings worries me too. All that money for just one day, when couple have so many other financial pressures. Why?”
In an interview about her Handmade Fair at Hampton Court Palace, she added: “Ben wears the trousers in our relationship. And I’m happy with that because I have enough of being in charge in every other area of my life.
“I think it’s quite modern and feminist of me to say, ‘You know what? I’ve decided that I don’t want to be the boss in the relationship’.” Allsopp, the presenter of Channel 4’s Location Location Location, said she is now determined that family is her “number one priority”. “And as much as I love my job, I’d never put it before them,” she said of her two sons Bay and Oscar.
“I even look forward to the teenage years and get quite angry about the current culture of parents moaning about teenagers.”