By james art 
IRVINE Welsh has revealed he doesn’t believe in marriage – despite being engaged three times.
The Trainspotting author married actress Emma Currie in 2022 after the couple met on the street in Edinburgh two years ago.
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But the 66-year-old writer wasn’t expecting any more nuptials after divorcing his first lady Anne Antsey in 2003. and split from his American ex-wife Beth Quinn in 2017. after almost 15 years together.
Speaking on the BBC Sounds Young Again podcast with Kirsty Young, he said: “The thing is, I never wanted to get married. This was not the plan at all.
“Strangely, for someone who has been married three times, I don’t really believe in marriage. I have no interest in it at all.”
The wordsmith explained: “The first time, it’s the moment of realization when you start to think that there are other people besides you, so it’s not necessarily just what you want.
“I would love to live together and I think it would be easier and more peaceful, but you get parental pressure from the other side and you think it’s making her life miserable, so let’s just do this.”
“The second time because we are from different countries and you have to be married to be together. For me to have a green card and live in America, and for her to have documents to live in Europe, you just have to be married.
“And the third time I’m madly in love with this woman and I’ve married two other people, so this one is mainly about me, it’s driven by my desire to make a romantic statement and tell the world that I’m crazy about this woman .
“I was crazy about the first two when we got together, but I didn’t see marriage as the mechanism through which I would express that. It was a more pragmatic means of coping and an easier life.”
Irvine also opened up about why he never wanted to be a father.
He himself is an only child, from a young age he realizes how madly in love his parents are and decides that he will prioritize romance over creating a family.
He said: “I’ve always been attracted to women who were quite militant about not having children.
“I like the romance of being with someone and I think the romance of the relationship kind of goes when there are kids involved.
“This is probably the only childhood competition in me not wanting to have a competitor around for attention. That might have something to do with it.
The author tells of being arrested at the tender age of eight for playing football where he shouldn’t have been, and his subsequent brush with the law.
While he also discussed his addiction to heroin and the realization that he needed to turn his life around.
He said: “It was a two-year period and only really out of control for one summer, so I experienced being a user and an addict and that was enough.
“The advice I would give to someone younger than me in their early 20s is to keep in touch with your family more. It wasn’t that I deliberately cut myself off, more like you just don’t think.
“You get missed phone calls and maybe you’ll call a few weeks later, but I wish I could have spent more time there and hung out with them during that period.
“I would appreciate that time. My father died when I was in my mid-20s, so I would have liked to have spent more time with him in his later years, and unfortunately that coincided with my most self-absorbed years.’
Irvine added: “One of the things I realized when the drug addiction got out of hand is that you always feel like you’re in control working in tandem with her.
“My aunt had passed away and I was very close to her. Before football I used to go to her place in Leith and she used to feed everyone.
“I remember talking to my mum on the phone and being really devastated and saying I felt sorry for my uncle Willie because they were a great couple
“I said Willie must be completely gutted, I’ll have to go see him.”
“She paused and said, ‘Willie died last year, son. Don’t you remember we called and told you about this?
“I was so lost in drugs and self-centeredness that it all passed me by.”
Welsh is currently writing a romance novel and working on several film and TV projects – including a show about Trainspotting character Francis Begbie, played by Robert Carlyle, 63, in the iconic films.
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