Charissa Thompson opened up on her love life in a revealing chat with Kylie Kelce, with the FOX Sports and Amazon Prime Video anchor admitting she “married the wrong people, plural.”
Thompson, 42, also lifted the lid on her decision not to have children as a result of her failed marriages. The sportscaster has previously revealed she got married at 25 to an unnamed man, labeling it “the best and worst decision I ever made,” with the couple parting ways soon after tying the not.
Thompson remarried in 2020, wedding baseball agent Kyle Thousand, but the pair went their separate ways and were divorced after less than two years of marriage. Thomspon said on Kelce’s ‘Not Gonna Lie’ podcast that the “heartache” of her relationships has guided her decision not to have kids.
“My choice to not have children grew from my struggle in marriages. What I mean by that is I married the wrong people, plural,” Thompson said. “I’ve been divorced twice and I had some situations that created a lot of mistrust and a lot of heartache and a lot of things that came from those experiences in marriage that I was like, ‘Oh I don’t want to attach myself to something that I can’t detach from.’
“That’s a big statement, right? I can get a divorce, I can walk away from those marriages but I can’t walk away from children. I always wanted to have kids. I mean, I grew up and I was the nanny, I babysat the neighbor kids when I was 11 years old and I watched them all the way to the time I graduated high school.
“So for seven years, and three kids later, I would travel with them, I would go over to their house every day and watch their kids. I was always around kids. I always had this idea that I was going to have kids I was going to have three boys and one girl, and she was going to be the last and youngest and the big brothers would take care of her.
“I also thought I was going to live happily ever after and have a beautiful white wedding and a marriage that lasted 45 years like my parents have been married; none of that happened.”
Soon-to-be mother-of-four Kelce wife of NFL legend and ESPN analyst Jason Kelce offered her support, telling ‘FOX NFL Sunday’ and ‘Thursday Night Football’ host Thompson her decision “Does not sound crazy, it sounds rational.”
Thompson continued: “For me, it went back to control. If I can’t control the outcome of these marriages, at least I can control that I’m not going to bring a child into the world and I don’t have to if me and the person I had the child with separated share that child. I’m never going to get married again, and everyone’s like, ‘Oh come on, you can’t let those experiences in the past ruin it,’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, I can.’
“You guys didn’t go through the hell I went through in those [relationships], and I take responsibility, too, for the outcome. This isn’t just like all of these things happened to me, I was a participant in the chaos and the outcome of these things.
“I’m done making decisions because somebody else wants that. I am very comfortable in that decision not to have children and I get that maternal instinct now with the animals that I have my dogs, my horse. It comes back to my need for my control because things were so out of control in the past, and half of that wasn’t my fault.”
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