Personal Life
Houghton announced her engagement to Preston on 11 April 2006. In an exclusive £300,000 deal each with OK! magazine, they were married on 25 August 2006 at the Dartmouth House in Mayfair, London.
After their honeymoon, the couple moved to Preston's flat in Brighton, East Sussex. In a later 2008 interview with Piers Morgan, Houghton admitted that Preston had told her one month after the wedding that he had not wanted to marry her. The couple continued undertaking interviews for various magazines, with Houghton losing weight and colouring her hair brunette to look more like Preston's former fiancee Camille.
Ten months later, on 27 June 2007 they announced in a joint statement that they were ending their marriage. "After much soul-searching and tearful discussions we have sadly decided to end our marriage," they said in the statement. “We hope we can always remain friends and still love each other but we both think we put so much pressure on one another to make our marriage work that it has ended up destroying our relationship. No one else is involved in our decision." The couple insisted their relationship was genuine and denied they had rushed into marriage. “We know people will think we married too quickly on the back of Big Brother but the truth is that, what anyone thinks, we did have a whirlwind romance but we were genuinely in love with each other at the time and we will never regret our time together. We both believe in marriage and we never treated our vows or our commitment to each other lightly. We've spent hours and hours discussing whether we can salvage our marriage, give it another go, try harder, anything rather than give up. But we now both agree that we should go our separate ways. We are both young and we still have our lives in front of us. The last two weeks or so have been very upsetting and sad for us and our friends and family and we appreciate their support."
The rumours of the final breakdown to their marriage were confirmed on 21 November 2007, when London's Reuters News Agency announced that Houghton had been granted a decree nisi at First Avenue House. Preston did not contest the petition, and neither appeared in court for the ninety–second hearing.
Read more about this topic: Chantelle Houghton
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