Leave Richard Keys alone – you can’t help who you fall in love with

Why does it matter if she’s half his age and younger than his daughter – who is also her former best friend? Leave them alone. They are in love!

TV pundit Richard Keys, 66, married lawyer Lucie Rose, 35, last weekend in an intimate open-air ceremony in Brixham, Devon, surrounded by small group of friends and close family. It looked idyllic. But given the public reaction, you’d be forgiven for thinking he’d murdered somebody.

The online outrage has been fierce, brutal – and (to me, at least) absolutely baffling. Why does it matter if she’s half his age and younger than Jemma, his daughter – or that Jemma (as has been claimed) is his new wife’s former best friend?

Leave them alone. They are in love!

The couple met in 2016, when he was still married to Julia – his wife of 36 years and the mother of their two children – who said in her self-help book The MANscript that her husband’s alleged affair had “devastated” both her and their two children.

In 2019, Keys denied that he left his wife, who was in remission for cancer at the time, for Lucie Rose.

And now Keys – who has been cornered into defending himself in a furious blog post – claims that his new wife wasn’t his daughter’s best friend, divorce didn’t harm his kids, and his first wife didn’t have cancer when he left her. Good for him. I hope he’s having a good honeymoon – but it’s a shame if he’s spending it feeling victimised.

OK, so it’s not straightforward, but life doesn’t always go to plan. I can’t imagine what it would be like if my dad married my best friend. But you can’t help who you fall in love with – as I understand only too well.

When I met my late partner Alex, it was love at first sight – a minute before I saw him outside an AA meeting on the Portobello Road my life was perfectly normal and then boom, I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him.

It is inexplicable when it happens – like a thunderbolt moment. I felt powerless. I didn’t intend to complicate my life – it just felt right. Yet some of my family and friends didn’t approve because he was a charismatic recovering alcoholic – who didn’t immediately commit to me.

It felt as if others wanted to control my fate and knew what was best for my heart. I too felt ostracized and judged harshly, just like Keys.

I found it hard to enjoy the pink cloud moments as I would be met by raised eyebrows and tut tutting because I was on a bit of a roller coaster with Alex – we weren’t settled and stable like them. Did that make it not real? Less about love? Should I have sacrificed my own happiness to appease them?

I eventually had Alex’s two children, but in a moment of madness, he ended his life tragically after suffering from depression. However, I don’t regret a moment of our time together. I would not have been able to live with myself had I not followed my heart – and I’ve never met anybody else since who I have felt the same way about.

Just because somebody is half your age – or in recovery from alcohol abuse or depressed – it doesn’t rule out a relationship. It’s also the case that people are expected to remain in marriages for decades – even though that is not always realistic? Sometimes it’s even worse to remain in an unfulfilling marriage or partnership for the sake of the kids – and quite frankly, why shouldn’t people be able to leave their partners and find happiness elsewhere?

Poor Keys also insisted his affair with Lucie did not “wreck” his children Joshua and Jemma’s lives – though neither attended the wedding (former Hollyoaks actor Jemma said in an interview in 2018 that their affair led her to spiral into alcoholism).  

Keys’s children are grown adults – not dependent children. It’s not his fault that cupid’s arrow hit him. And what is wrong with Richard apparently texting Julia two hours before the nuptials took place?

He was probably trying to have some peace and quiet before hell broke loose. I don’t blame him. Julia is in a new relationship anyway – she’s said to have moved on and is “really happy”.

I’m not saying break-ups are easy. But it’s time that people understand that matters of the heart aren’t always in our control.

As the mantra goes: “To thy own self be true.” I hope Keys remembers that on his honeymoon in Canada.