Chelsea Winter’s ex husband Mike Bullot has opened up about marriage and kids, revealing that he has never found “the right person” to have children with.
The 35-year-old sailing coach and Olympic sailor, who was married to celebrity chef Chelsea Winter for “four to five years” from 2013, said he wanted to start a family, and had been in a relationship where having children was the obvious next step, but a “timing thing” had meant they didn’t and he now felt “pretty lucky” that it had turned out that way.
He made the bombshell revelation on Sunday night’s episode of The Bachelorette NZ during a conversation with bachelorette Lesina Nakhid-Schuster.
Lesina, who is known on the show as The Question Assassin, had begun probing him about how he felt about kids.
“Are you a kids guy?” she began the conversation.
Mike replied, “The thing about having a family is that now I know you’ve got to make sure you’re doing it with the right person, and I think once you find the right person then it probably makes more sense or you can sort of make that decision a lot easier when you’ve done that.
“Obviously I want a family,” he continued.
“You weren’t that convincing…” Lesina countered, to which he responded, “You’ve got to remember that I kind of went through that phase of that was the next step.”
“Why didn’t you do it?” Lesina asked.
“It was sort of a timing thing and I feel pretty lucky that we didn’t,” he said.
“I think too many people jump into a family with people who are probably not perfectly… and that’s when they get into all sorts of… yeah.”
Chelsea announced she and Mike’s separation in November 2018.
And Mike revealed last week on the show that he has remained single since his marriage ended.
Apart from “a couple of girls overseas” he “hasn’t really dated”, he said.
When Lesina asked him why his marriage didn’t work out he said, “I think we just became different people.”
Chelsea, who moved back to her home town of Mt Maunganui after her marriage ended, is now in a relationship with her childhood sweetheart, winemaker Douglas Renall.
She told NEXT magazine last year that it was something of a serendipitous development to reconnect with her former primary school flame.
They had enjoyed a number of weeks together in France and got to know one another again after a 25-year hiatus.
Chelsea and Douglas had their first child, a son Sky, in July 2019, with Chelsea announcing their baby news on social media.
Baby Sky was born in a planned home birth after only 90 minutes of established labour.
In January Chelsea told Woman’s Day that she felt “incredibly blessed” to have become a mother.
“I had a beautiful and easy pregnancy, a super-quick birth and now I’ve got my little boy. Of course there have been hard days and the exhaustion is real, but he just gets more awesome by the day.”
