Ulrika Jonsson has been quite open about the fact that she’s had “a weird life” – with three marriages, four children, and appearances on numerous reality TV shows including Channel 4’s Am I a Sex Addict?. But as her kids have grown older, there’s been growing pressure for her to be a little less candid.
She explained on the Suddenly Single podcast: “When they were younger I was able to write and say more or less anything…but now of course you can’t take a photo and put it on Instagram without them saying ‘Don’t post that!’
“They don’t want to read about certain things, but it’s been part of what I do as a writer – is to write about those kinds of situations. I’ve had to say to my children, at times, ‘You’re just going to have to suck it up, because this is what I do’.”
Ulrika says she’s been “effectively” single since divorcing US ad executive Brian Monet almost six years ago.
Since then, she admits, she’s been on a “damaging” amount of dates. She describes apps such as Tinder and Hinge as “the death of romance,” although she does confess that she set up a profile a couple of years back.
“It was my best friend and her girlfriend at the time who sort of put me on them, just as we had had the first lockdown.
“She said ‘You’re going to go crazy with three kids at home… you need a distraction’. So they set up some sort of profile on Tinder, which I never used, but then I went on Hinge.”
Ulrika says she also experimented with “celebrity” dating app Raya, which reportedly only accepts eight percent of applicants, making it harder to get into than either Oxford or Cambridge universities, but she wasn’t keen: “I found that the people on there were too much up their own a***s, they very much had a sense of their own self-importance.”
Besides, she adds, she’s no longer interested in dating people who are in the public eye: “I want a normal person,” she stresses.