Clare Balding was proposed to by a soldier boyfriend before she met her wife.
Clare Balding was proposed to by a soldier boyfriend before she met her wife
The 63-year-old BBC sports presenter, who is fronting coverage of the Paris Olympics, married her partner of 21 years – former Radio 4 broadcaster Alice Arnold, 62, in 2015 after they entered into a civil partnership in 2006.
Clare told the Daily Mirror about how she had “one very serious” boyfriend who was in the Army for “two or three years” before meeting Alice, who asked her to marry him before he went on a tour of duty.
She added: “I thought, ‘He’s only asking me because he thinks he’s in danger’.
“I meant to say yes at this point. And I knew I didn’t want to.
“And I said, ‘Look, that’s a lovely thing to say but ask me again when you come back’.
“When he came back, he didn’t ask me again, and I thought, ‘Thank God’.
“When I first fell in love with a woman, it was completely different.”
Clare has become a loud supporter of LGBT+ rights, but said it was not easy coming out to her family.
She said: “I think my mother was very concerned it would affect my work. I’d been to the Sydney Olympics in 2000.
“But until you own it, it’s not legitimate. That is why I say to people, ‘Don’t hide the thing that makes you happiest. Don’t hide your love’.
“Why would you do that? But luckily, the world has changed a lot.”
Clare and Alice appear together looking cosy on their sofa in their west London home on Channel 4’s ‘Celebrity Gogglebox’, and the host says their marriage works as they are like a sports team.
She added: “What are we like? Well, I would use a sporty term, I would say being a team. Trying to achieve the same goal.
“But I think we are amazingly open and honest with each other. And I do think that is easier sometimes when you’re two women or indeed two men. Not all the time... men and women do think differently.
“And I think sometimes that is challenging in relationships. I’m not saying that straight relationships never work. Of course they do. But there are challenges that are not challenges for us. It’s interesting.”
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