Loose Women’s Kaye Adams is in no hurry to wed after 22 years with the father of her children – but today she reveals she’d say YES if he asked.
The Scottish presenter has two daughters with long-term partner Ian Campbell.
She says: “When we first met Ian was in his late 20s working as a tennis coach, spending half his life in Italy and half in Scotland, and he was not a man going to settle down.
“He’s an unconventional person and I didn’t have any great thoughts of settling down at that stage either.
“It was just a relationship that carried on and carried on, very happily, and maybe we just passed the point of getting married .
"We don’t have an anniversary but we’ve been together for about 22 years.
“But if Ian wants to pop the question and I get a decent ring and a good holiday out of it I wouldn’t say no.”
Kaye, 53, who lives in Glasgow and combines hosting a BBC Radio Scotland show with her role on Loose Women , says having daughters Charly, 13, and Bonnie, eight, was all the commitment she needed.
“The huge decision for Ian and I was to have children and I guess that was our equivalent of getting married,” she says.
“It was eight years before we had kids and I think, for us, that represents our commitment to each other.
“We would never have had children if we weren’t going to stay together and getting married isn’t something that needs to happen for our relationship.”
Kaye hosted the first Loose Women show in 1999 and has grown close to her fellow presenters, including Nadia Sawalha.
“I’ve been on holiday with Nadia and her husband Mark and I don’t think their relationship is any different from ours because they’re married,” says Kaye, who returned to the show two years ago after a seven-year break.
“She may have a different view on that. But my fellow Loose Women don’t say anything to me about getting married, which I think speaks volumes. I’m very happy.”
Read more: Kaye Adams reveals there's never any hard feelings after Loose Women
Kaye seems fully in control when she presents Loose Women, often defusing arguments and dealing with unpredictable guests. But she laughingly admits her home life can be less regimented.
“I am the classic swan,” she says. “At home, I just go with the flow and it’s quite chaotic. I’ve got a near-14-year-old who is smarter than I’ll ever be and a little one who’s hyper most of the time.
“I’m like anybody else, you’re trying to do the job, cook dinner, take the dog for a walk. If there’s anyone who’s fully in control of all of that and they don’t have a staff of 10, I’d like to meet them.”
Kaye’s break from Loose Women came in 2007 when she realised something had to give.
“I’m based in Glasgow and there’s a lot of travelling,” she says. “When Bonnie was born Charly was four and a half and their needs were very different. I was trying to breastfeed the little one, not particularly successfully, and Charly was preparing to go to school. It just wasn’t working.
“I’d always been in charge of my own time and schedule and I thought, how am I going to factor in a baby? What calmed me down was saying to myself, you need to take it a week at a time.
“Now 13 years on that’s still what I’m doing. We sit down on Sunday and have a diary meeting, and take it bit by bit. If you look at the whole picture you’d go under the duvet and not come up again.”
Now she is firmly back on the ITV1 show – and is delighted it has been nominated for a National Television Award for best live magazine show.
“It’s a really lovely surprise,” she says. “It’s voted for by the public which is a huge thing. It means we must be doing something right.”
As television’s first all-female panel show, the programme broke the mould.
“It was so out of sync with what was happening at the time,” says Kaye.
“It gave us a tremendous sense of freedom, we’d nothing to lose. The heart of the show has never changed – the conversations women have, both in terms of the subject matter and the way they have them.”
Kaye vividly remembers starting out on the show.
“In the first few weeks I interviewed Ivana Trump. Nadia and I were like a couple of giggling schoolgirls and she wiped the floor with us. And Karren Brady used to let us try on her jewellery, which we enjoyed very much.”
Her biggest shock on returning two years ago was online trolls.
She says: “I can remember the first few weeks, sitting in my dressing room, looking at negative comments on Twitter .
“I felt as if somebody had punched me in the solar plexus. On a good day you can take anything.
"But on another day, you’ve maybe had a row with your partner, you look in the mirror and you feel rubbish, and somebody tells you you’re a waste of oxygen, it can hurt.
“But Nadia said ‘Don’t be ridiculous, most people have always liked you, it’s just now you know about the ones that don’t’. She said it happens to everyone. Somehow that made me feel better.”
She adds: “I’m really very happy in my career. I’m really enjoying the mix I’ve got. I’ve absolutely no complaints.”
'We're all real women - and we have a real laugh'
Kaye says the highlight of her past year on Loose Women has been working with her brilliant fellow panellists including Coleen Nolan, Andrea McLean and Nadia Sawalha.
“I like there’s a sense of camaraderie – even if you’re not on that day you still feel part of what is going on,” she says.
“I laugh a lot, from first thing in the morning. If Coleen’s on she’s always there really early – I think she hasn’t been home to be honest – and she always makes me laugh .”
A sense of humour is clearly key – as is honesty.
“Good Loose Women have authenticity and probably a few battle scars,” adds Kaye.
“The viewers don’t want people who are preten.ding to be something they are not.”
- Loose Women is on ITV, weekdays at 12.30pm.
- Vote for the show in the National Television Awards at nationaltvawards.com by the deadline of noon on Wednesday