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Winona Ryder Says She Never Married Because Her Parents Set The Bar Too High

By Victoria Miller
Published on: 00:35 PST, Jul 15, 2016

Winona Ryder has some serious thoughts about marriage. As in, it’s not for her. In a new interview with Net-a-Porte’s The Edit, the 44-year-old actress revealed that she is all about monogamy, but marriage scares her a little bit.

“I’m a serial monogamist,” Winona told The Edit. “I was single for a while and dating and…I just didn’t know how to do it! I’ve always been like that: when I was
15, there was a guy I liked, and we made out, and I thought that meant he was my boyfriend. My mom had to explain it to me.”

While she is definitely a one-man woman, Winona Ryder seemingly draws the line at walking down the aisle for fear of what would happen if things didn’t work out.

“Marriage? I don’t know,” Ryder said. “I’d rather never have been married than been divorced a few times. Not that there’s anything wrong with divorce, but I don’t think I could do it if that was a possibility. When your parents are madly in love for 45 years, your standards are really high.”

This is not the first time Winona Ryder has said her parents set “too good” of an example of what her marriage could be. In a previous interview with the U.K.’s The Telegraph, Winona said it’s “crazy” how in love her parents still are after so many years together.

“It’s crazy because they are still so in love after 43 years together – and I mean giddily in love,” Ryder said in 2014. “That set the bar so high for me. I think it may be why I never got married.”

Winona Ryder’s parents, Cynthia Palmer and Michael Horowitz, are authors and archivists who raised their family in an unconventional way. Ryder’s parents were famously friends with beat poet Allen Ginsberg and LSD guru Timothy Leary. Leary was even Winona’s godfather.

In the Telegraph interview, a then-42-year-old Winona Ryder talked about her ticking biological clock, saying her father reminded her that she doesn’t have to have a husband in order to have a baby.

“I was talking to my dad last year and saying, ‘What if I can’t have a kid?’ and he said, ‘There are other ways to have children in your life.’ That’s true – and I get these amazing doses with my brother’s kids,” Ryder revealed.

Despite her hesitation, Ryder has said that she “very much believes” in marriage. In fact, Winona Ryder has been engaged in the past, but she may have been too young to realize what she was doing! Winona was only a teen when she became engaged to her first real love, her ’90s boyfriend Johnny Depp.

Ryder and Depp met in 1989 at the premiere of the movie Great Balls of Fire and after a whirlwind romance, they were engaged within five months. The young lovebirds later starred in the movie Edward Scissorhands together and were tabloid darlings as they publicly touted their love for one another. Ryder was once quoted as saying she was “pure virgin” before she met Depp, and the actor famously got a “Winona Forever” tattoo on his arm. When the couple split three years after their engagement, Winona said it was her first real heartbreak.

As for her current relationship status, Winona Ryder told The Edit that she’s ”been happily with someone for quite a while now.” That “someone” is longtime boyfriend, fashion designer Scott MacKinlay Hahn, whom she has been in a relationship with since 2011. Of course, that’s longer than many marriages last!

Take a look at the video below for more on Winona Ryder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NQsZQ3rIM0

[Photo by Chelsea Lauren/Getty Images for Sundance]

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