Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain: ‘I won’t force my children to have arranged marriages like me’

Nadiya Hussain has revealed that she won’t force her children to have arranged marriages, despite the fact that she had one herself.

The Great British Bake Off winner said she wants to “move with the times” and won’t be helping her children to finds partners in the future.

“It's tough - you are pretty much marrying a complete stranger. We need to move with the times,” she told Good Housekeeping magazine.

“I don't think (my children) need me to find them a husband or a wife. They will do a better job than I will.”

Hussain married husband Abdal in an arranged ceremony when she was just 19, and says she has learnt how to make the relationship work over the years.

“I had an arranged marriage, and learnt you have to persevere and remember we are all human and all have faults,” she said.

"Obviously my husband Abdal has more faults than I do! We had to live through the good and the bad, and have come out the other side.”

She added: “Love is strange... it creeps up on you and then smacks you in the face. I didn't know my husband, and then we had two children, and then I fell in love with him."

Hussain has been one of the most successful winners of the baking much-loved show, having gone on to front her own shows The Chronicles of Nadiya and Nadiya’s British Food Adventure.

She recently admitted that she was worried about being the “token Muslim” on the 2015 series of the show.

“I certainly didn't enter a baking show in the hope of representing anyone,” she told the Radio Times.

“Being a Muslim for me was incidental, but from the day the show was launched, I was 'the 30-year-old Muslim' and that became my identity.”

The full interview appears in the September issue of Good Housekeeping, on sale August 2.