Elizabeth Day
Twitter is no plac place to find a spouse
I found out this week that MasterChef judge Gregg Wallace has got married for the fourth time. I hadn’t previously realised he was a serial husband. Prior to this, I’ve known Wallace only for his cheeky-chappy television persona (Dick van Dyke crossed with the perpetually cheerful man who hands out free copies of NME near the Tube station) and his borderline-inappropriate love of puddings.
On the show, he often proclaims laims he wants to “bury bury his face” ” in an oozing hot chocolate fondant ant or a wobbly vanilla pannana cotta, and he says this with such fervour that you start to wonder if the desserts erts mysteriously disappear ppear to his dressing room m to be fondled.
But ut this week, Gregg gg (right) did an interviewrview with daytime ime TV host Lorraine aine Kelly, and I learnt that he had ad once again tied the knot – this time with a woman man 21 years his junior. unior. I’ve got no problem roblem with the age thing. They’re y’re both consentingenting adults (unlike ke the puddings), and age is but a number.
What hat I am mildly concerned erned about is that he met his wife, AnneMarie, e, on Twitter.
“I did a programme cooking king with duck and rhubarb, barb, and she sent a message sage saying: ‘Does that really y work?’” Gregg told Kelly, y, proving once and for all ll that modern romanceance is not dead. “I wentt to reply, and looked at her photo and thought: ‘Oh my word, you’re a pretty girl…’”
I have a couple of things to say about this. First, we still haven’t ascertained whether duck and rhubarb really does work. Duck and Rhubarb sounds more like something you’d call a pair of cutesy children’s cartoon characters than a valid food combination.
Second, the fact that Wallace still uses phrases such as “Oh my word”, and refers to grown women as “girls” suggests he probably doesn’t know how Twitter actually works. He probably calls it “the Twitter” and uses a dial-up internet connection. Anyway, Wallace and Anne-Marie exchangedexchang a few private messages, and thenth he sent her his ph phone number (was it a landline, Gregg?), anda that was five years ago,ag and now they’re mar married. I wish them the ve very best. But I’m not sur sure Twitter is the perfect place to make a lastinglastin spousal connection, especially given that Wallace also met his thirdt wife, Heidi, on the sam same social network. On thattha occasion, he posted a jokej about “jiggling cabbage”,cabbag and Heidi saucily repliedrepli with a question about celery. They met. Fell ini love. Tied the knot. Got divorced after 14 months.
History does not record where Wallace met his second wife, Denise, whom he married in 1999, or his first, Christine, whom he married in 1991 and divorced the same year, but Twitter wasn’t invented then.
It’s not that I bear Wallace any ill will. It’s simply that I’m worried about him. On Twitter, no one is telling the truth about themselves. For one thing, unlike successful dating sites, you’re only allowed 140 characters a pop, which means most people are just sharing jokes about Theresa May’s legs or gifs of cats being scared by printers.
On social media we create an alternative persona. We use carefully filtered profile images that show us at our best angle; we choose how our life is portrayed.
There’s a darker side, too. In creating alternate personalities, we create more extreme versions of ourselves. We can type whatever we want from behind the relative safety of a computer screen. That makes the internet fertile ground for abuse.
On Twitter, people say things they would probably think twice about shouting to someone in the street because there is no immediate human reaction to make you feel bad. Which is why the columnist Katie Hopkins presumably felt able to send a tweet accusing the writer Jack Monroe of vandalising a war memorial, only for Monroe to sue her for libel. It’s also why, every time I appear on Sky News to review the papers, someone, somewhere will unfailingly call me what James Naughtie once accidentally called Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt.
Personally, I’d rather stick to the cat videos. Twitter is no place to look for a spouse.
I looked at her photo and thought: ‘Oh my word, you’re a pretty girl…’