Paddy McGuinness married the model Christine Martin at Thornton Manor on the Wirral in June 2011. Their divorce was finalised in October 2024. He is 53, she is 38, and the two of them still live in the same Cheshire house with their three children.
In August, the former Take Me Out host was photographed in London with Emma Carey, a BBC Radio 2 publicist who left her job shortly afterwards. It was the first time he had been publicly attached to anyone since the marriage ended. Christine, by contrast, has been dating openly for years, and the household absorbed that without much apparent trouble.
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The model who married Paddy McGuinness
They met in 2007 at the Liverpool International Tennis Tournament, where Christine was working a fashion show for Cricket, a boutique in the city. A mutual friend introduced them. She was 19 and won Miss Liverpool that year. He was 33 and known through Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights and Max and Paddy’s Road to Nowhere, with Take Me Out and Top Gear still ahead of him.
He proposed on Christmas Day 2008. They married two and a half years later, with Peter Kay as best man. In her memoir, A Beautiful Nightmare, Christine wrote that her own father did not turn up to walk her down the aisle.
Born in Blackpool and raised in Halewood on Merseyside, she appeared on The Real Housewives of Cheshire between 2018 and 2020 and left the show by her own choice. She now presents and writes, and is an ambassador for Caudwell Children and the National Autistic Society.
Three children, and a diagnosis that arrived late
Twins Leo and Penelope were born in July 2013, and Felicity followed in September 2016. All three were later diagnosed as autistic, and the family made a BBC One documentary about it, Paddy and Christine McGuinness: Our Family and Autism, broadcast in December 2021.
Christine was diagnosed autistic during filming, at 33, and with ADHD not long after. The diagnosis made her start asking which parts of herself were actually hers. “For the last 15 years my role has been wife and mum,” she said in a follow-up documentary, Unmasking My Autism, in March 2023. She described clearing out a wardrobe full of clothes she had bought because she thought she was supposed to look a certain way.
What Christine has said about the split
The separation was announced in a joint statement on 22 July 2022, seven months after the first documentary aired. They had been married 11 years and together for 15, and they said the decision had been taken privately some time earlier.
Christine’s account since is the fullest either of them has given. She stayed longer than she should have, she said, because she does not cope well with change and the marriage felt safe. Weeks before the announcement she told The Sun that the two of them were having a very difficult time, and that whatever had happened, she had not caused it. Plenty of speculation followed. Neither of them has ever set out what actually happened, and nothing beyond her own words is confirmed.
The house they could not sell
They kept living together after separating, dividing the seven-bedroom Prestbury house they had bought for ยฃ2.1 million in 2020 so their children would not have to move between two homes. Christine has described taking the floor with the kids while Paddy took another part of the house.
The reasoning was practical. Their children are autistic, and disruption is harder for them to absorb. Everything the kids needed stayed in one place, and it mattered less which parent was home on a given night.
There was friction over it. The house went on the market in March 2025 at ยฃ6.5 million, and a source told MailOnline that Christine considered the price inflated and felt stuck in the arrangement. By that August it had drawn very little interest, according to The Sun. A year on from that, the two of them were still under the same roof, and Christine had begun talking about wanting a flat of her own in London for work.
Both of them are seeing other people now
Christine has spoken openly about dating women since the split and has said she would love to have a wife one day. She has been linked with the musician Chelcee Grimes and, more recently, the Olympic boxer Nicola Adams, though neither she nor Adams has confirmed a relationship.
Paddy told Woman’s Own in October 2025 that he was not back in the dating world and was “concentrating fully on work and providing for my kids”. Ten months later came the London photographs with Emma Carey.
Christine had flagged the risk in advance. She told The Times the living arrangement was probably not going to work if either of them started a new relationship. When it happened, a source told new magazine she was relieved rather than upset, and glad he was happy.
How they manage it is straightforward enough. The two of them agreed after separating how much they wanted to know about each other’s private lives, and settled on very little. “It just stays outside the home,” she said.
