Nadiya Hussain has revealed she doesn’t want her children to have arranged marriages, unlike herself.
The 2015 ‘Great British Bake Off’ winner married her husband Abdal when she was just 19, who she admits, she only fell in love with after they had children.
The 32-year-old told Good Housekeeping magazine that she had to “move with the times” when it came to her three children.
“I don’t think [my children] need me to find them a husband or a wife,” she told the mag. “They will do a better job than I will.”
Talking about her arranged marriage, Nadiya said: “It’s tough - you are pretty much marrying a complete stranger.
“I had an arranged marriage, and learnt you have to persevere and remember we are all human and all have faults.
“Obviously my husband Abdal has more faults than I do!
“We had to live through the good and the bad, and have come out the other side.
“Love is strange...it creeps up on you and then smacks you in the face.
“I didn’t know my husband, and then we had two children, and then I fell in love with him.”
Nadiya added that she encourages her offspring to be independent.
She said: “They won’t be living with me when they’re 18 - I’ve got a cruise to go on.
“I don’t give them pocket money for doing chores - I don’t get paid to do the dishes, so they don’t either.”
Earlier this month, Nadiya said she feared she was the “token Muslim” when she appeared on ‘Bake Off’, and admitted she struggled with it being so tied to her identity.
She said: “I certainly didn’t enter a baking show in the hope of representing anyone.
“Being a Muslim for me was incidental, but from the day the show was launched, I was ‘the 30-year-old Muslim’ and that became my identity.
“I struggled at the beginning, because I thought: ‘Am I the token Muslim?’ I’d never, in all my years, been labelled like that.”
The full interview with Nadiya appears in the September issue of Good Housekeeping, on sale August 2. www.goodhousekeeping.co.uk