A wedding with thousands of guests at the Malieveld and a livestream at Vogue: Not many people can say that their marriage has started this big. Anouk will give her yes for the third time on Saturday, this time to her beloved Dominique. The singer is sure: three times is a charm.
“I am a housewife. I really feel like a housewife who occasionally, say six to ten times a year, has to leave the house to earn money,” says Anouk in an interview with Ruud de Wild. And Saturday it’s that time again. Then the singer is on the Malieveld in The Hague and gives her fans what they want so much: a live performance. And to make it even more special, Anouk and her fiancé Dominique Schemmekes decided to say yes to each other there.
All six of the singer’s children will see her and Schemmekes on stage to accompany during the emotional moment. And then Anouk will probably just continue performing, she previously told Eva Jinek. “I don’t know what that’s going to look like, it’s all going to be a bit of a mess because I’ll probably do it on my show. I think I’ll stop, then get married and then finish my show.”
A bigger marriage than this is almost impossible in the Netherlands. The choice is remarkable: in her previous two marriages, the wedding was secret. Anouk herself is sober about it. “Of course I have been married twice in secret and twice publicly,” said the singer. “I thought: I’m going to do that the other way around, and then hopefully without a divorce.”
Those two previous marriages did affect Anouk: about twenty times she turned down a marriage proposal from Schemmekes. She eventually proposed to him herself, in the middle of the corona crisis, when the singer was forced to stay alone in a hotel because she had serious lung problems and she did not want to impose strict rules on her children for fear of getting sick.
To this day it is unclear when Anouk first got married, but the divorce was indeed public. The singer was married to her then manager Edwin Jansen (whom most people will know as a jury member of Idols), but in 1998 the couple announced their split. After the divorce, she met Remon Stotijn (better known as Postman), with whom she had her first child in 2002.
After the births of sons Benjahmin Kingsley and Elijah Jeremiah, Stotijn and Anouk gave each other in March 2004 the Yes-word. The marriage seemed to be going well, as in 2005 the couple first became parents to a daughter (Phoenix Ray) and a year later the family moved to the United States. That did not last long, because a year later the family returned. In 2008 the couple divorced.
Remon Stotijn, better known as Postman.
Remon Stotijn, better known as Postman. Photo: ANP
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Anouk did not see that divorce coming. “The first time I got married, that was just stupidity. But the second time I thought: this is it. I’m going to grow old with this man,” the singer said at the time. VIVA† “I’m not just going to bring three children into the world with someone, I really only do that if I’m sure. So yes, when it passed, his departure was very unexpected for me, that was very difficult.”
A marriage did not come after that, although the singer did have a serious relationship with rapper Unorthodox. Together they had son Jesiah, but the relationship ended when it turned out that the rapper Anouk was anything but faithful. Son Sion Jethro was born in 2014, but his father was not revealed until much later. It turned out to be basketball player Seraino Dalgliesh, with whom Anouk had a relationship at the time.
Living together, getting married: it seemed no longer an option for the singer. Until she met Schemmekes, with whom she went to live in one house and with whom she had daughter Jelizah. The couple has been together for seven years and celebrates love on Saturday, bigger than Anouk ever did. And then she takes his name, because that’s what the basketball player really wanted. “When I first got to know him, I said: Schemmekes?! My god, I would never marry you, if only because of your last name!”, the singer said about that. Yet from Saturday she will go through life as Anouk Schemmekes.
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