20 Mind-Blowing Facts You Never Knew About George RR Martin

15. He's Been Married A Lot

You may not think it to look at him, but George R.R. Martin's quite the player. For a large part of the seventies he was the long-term romantic partner of fellow sci-fi and fantasy writer Lisa Tuttle, with whom he co-wrote the novel Windhaven. They broke up, and Tuttle went on to have long dalliances other sci-fi writers, including Steven Utley and Christopher Priest. Not that Martin was too cut up. He met his first wife, Gale Burnick, at an East Coast science fiction convention. Their first dance was to Simon and Garnfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water, which turned out to be a bad omen: married in 1975, they divorced in 1979. Thankfully, that's a lot less dramatic than the way weddings tend to end in his fiction. After that, his longest relationship was with Parris McBride, whom he'd been with for years but only properly married in early 2011, before holding a larger wedding ceremony and reception at Renovation, the 69th World Science Fiction Convention in Nevada. They had met in 1975, but didn't begin dating until the eighties (after his first two major relationships). She came to visit him in New Mexico from Oregon, and never left.