Whoopi Goldberg got married three times because she thought it was "expected" of her.
The 63-year-old television personality was married to Alvin Martin between 1973 and 1979, David Claessen between 1986 and 1988 and Lyle Trachtenberg between 1994 and 1995 but she has insisted they never worked out because she couldn’t "share" things with them.
She told the New York Times magazine: "Look, people expect you to have a boyfriend. They expect you to get married. So I kept trying to do that, but I didn’t want to share information with somebody else. I didn’t want anybody asking me why I was doing what I was doing, or to have to make the other person feel better.
"But if you’re in a relationship, you have to do those things, and it took me a while to figure out that I didn’t want to. I’d be thinking, why don’t I feel the thing that I’m supposed to? Then one day I thought: I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to conform. I tried marriage, and it wasn’t for me. You can’t be in a marriage because everybody’s expecting you to."
Whoopi confessed she feels responsible for her three failed marriages as she hadn’t been "really in love" with her spouses, so just wasn’t committed to making their relationships work.
She said: "It took me some time but I realised that trying to turn myself in to something I wasn’t ready for a man wasn’t his fault. It was mine. My marriages failed and I was the common denominator. My commitment was never that strong. I can say now that I was never really in love. The realisation freed me up. I love men and men love me. I’m lucky that way. I just feel bad that it took me so long to realise that I wasn’t meant to be in a relationship."
Whoopi Goldberg felt pressure to marry
