How did Emmanuel Macron’s parents react when they found out about his relationship with Brigitte, his current wife? The French president answered this question during a program broadcast on France 2.

Like Jacques Chirac in 2002 and Nicolas Sarkozy in 2015, the French head of state agreed to candidly answer a variety of and often atypical questions from non-professional and autistic reporters during the Rencontres du Papotin.

One of them asked “why can’t a sick person fall in love with someone who cares for him?”. “I think the principle of love is that anything is possible. You don’t really choose love, it happens to you…” Then the young man handed him a handwritten paper, read by the president, on which was written: “He is the president, he should lead by example and not marry his teacher.” With a smile on his face, Macron said: “When you’re in love, you don’t choose. Besides, she was my drama teacher, so it doesn’t matter.’

Macron was then asked how his parents reacted when they found out about his relationship with Brigitte: “It’s bad, it’s normal. I think you always imagine some kind of standard life for your children, and when something happens that doesn’t fit your mold, you don’t necessarily feel comfortable and your parents worry about you at first. It was a mixture of everything, and it redoubled my desire to follow my own path.”

Brigitte, 69, is 25 years older than Emmanuel Macron, for whom she was a high school drama teacher.

They first met when Macron was 15, and two years later he made a shocking promise to his teacher.

“At 17, Emmanuel told me, ‘Whatever you do, I’ll marry you!'” she told Paris Match magazine in 2016.

The relationship began after Macron acted in Brigitte’s plays when she was just 18 at a private Jesuit school in Amiens, northern France.

At that time, the drama club was led by the married Brigitte Ozier, who had three children, and a member of the club was Macron, a lover of literature who dreamed of being a novelist.

Macron later moved to Paris for his final year of high school. At that time, according to him, they called each other all the time, talked on the phone for hours.

“He was not a teenager. He had an equal relationship with other adults,” she said in a television documentary.

Finally, Brigitte moved to the capital of France to be with her lover and divorced. Since then, they have been together, but the marriage took place only in 2007, and Brigitte did not take her husband’s last name.

Macron studied philosophy at the University of Nanterre in Paris and received a postgraduate degree from the National School of Management.

After working for several years as a civil servant, he became an investment banker at Rothschild.

Macron quickly climbed the career ladder, earning millions, before becoming economic adviser to President Francois Hollande in 2012 and then economy minister two years later.

Macron, on the other hand, was forced to deny having an extramarital homosexual relationship because political rivals claimed he was supported by the “homosexual lobby”.

But Macron laughed off rumors of a same-sex relationship with Radio France chief executive Mathieu Hallet during a campaign meeting with activists from his political movement En Marche.