What Charlotte Church asked her ex after splitting up shows her true colours

Charlotte Church and Gavin Henson split in 2010 after five years together and a brief engagement, but the Welsh singer didn't waste any time in moving on

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Charlotte Church wasted no time moving on following her split from Welsh rugby legend Gavin Henson. The couple had been together for five years, shared two children and were briefly engaged. Yet just weeks after their 2010 separation, Church began seeing someone new.

Soon after, reports surfaced that she was dating musician Jonathan Powell - now her husband. Church later admitted she felt it was only right to speak to Gavin before confirming the relationship publicly.

"I'd been writing with Johnny for a while, but it was a good couple of months after me and Gav split," she told the BBC in 2010. "I kind of asked Gav's permission in a way. I said to him, 'I really want you to know that nothing ever went on between me and Johnny while we were still together.'

"Johnny had a girlfriend when we were first working together and I had Gav. And I'm not that type of person. I hadn't really noticed any feelings at that point. When I'm a taken woman, I'm a taken woman - that's the way I see things."

Church and Henson began their romance in 2005, with the rugby player earning 33 caps for Wales and also featuring for the British and Irish Lions. Their daughter Ruby was born in 2007, followed by their son Dexter two years later.

Labelled 'the Welsh Posh and Becks', their relationship became a media obsession, creating immense pressure. "The press intrusion was insane, there was all sorts of dark stuff going on," Church said earlier this month ahead of her appearance on The Celebrity Traitors.

"There were stories in the papers all the time and lots of things were blown up, misconstrued and made seedy - when they really weren't. There was a lot of shame being thrown at me, with the press desperately trying to make me a figure of sin and push this 'fallen angel' narrative."

A major legal dispute followed, eventually resolved in 2012, revealing that News Group Newspaper reporters had spied on Church and even accessed her medical records. She later said her anger and determination helped her endure the intense media attention and "kept me protected."

"If I had let that shame in, or internalised it, my life could have gone in a very different way," she said.

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From the outside, their relationship looked the stuff of dreams - but privately, cracks had started to show. The two lived very different lives, which gradually pulled them apart. "We were such different people in every way," Charlotte reflected years later.

"That was amazing at the start, as we were always teaching each other new things. Then we were just too different. Different beliefs in everything.

"His world was alien to me. All that training. He's so strict with what he eats, what time he goes to sleep. And my life was alien to him. I don't think it [the split] was about arguing. I think one day we just thought, 'What are we doing?'"

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Still, when Gavin popped the question, Charlotte was "overjoyed". But after the rugby player returned from a filming trip to Norway a few weeks later, everything shifted.

"It was amazing. I really was going to marry Gav and spend the rest of my life with him," Charlotte recalled. "But then he came back from Norway, and he'd changed, and I'd had time to think. We had both had a change of heart - so we were both of the same mind."

Despite the breakup, Charlotte and Gavin have remained on friendly terms, co-parenting their now-teenage children. Both have since remarried - Church wed Powell in 2017 and welcomed a daughter, Frida, in 2020, while Henson tied the knot with his long-time partner Katie Mould in 2019.