On 2 June 2000, when he was 56 years old, Humphrys and his then partner, Valerie Sanderson, had a son, Owen James. Sanderson was a newsreader with "Spotlight" then BBC News 24 and is now a radio producer. Humphrys had a reverse vasectomy. He referred to these facts on 31 October 2006 on BBC Radio 4 in the programme "Humphrys in Search of God". He and Sanderson subsequently separated. In 2009, he began a relationship with the journalist Catherine Bennett, a contributor to "The Observer".