"We looked each other square in the eye. I was a little nervous. When I saw against her vanilla skin how her chocolate eyes melted, I knew she was nervous, too."
– David on Rose

Rose McGowan met David Zinczenko, the editor of Men's Health, in late 2002. "I found myself on line at the concession stand and - typical actress - I had no money on me. David was standing behind me, and I just turned and said, 'I'm sorry, do you have any money I can borrow? I need peanuts desperately.' So he ponied up for some peanuts, and we've been hanging out ever since", Rose said of their first meeting. Despite her being located in Los Angeles and Dave residing in New York, the couple was able to make their relationship work for several years. They would spend the weekends together, both communing to the opposite sides of the US for each other.

Unfortunately Rose and David parted their ways in the spring of 2005.

After the break up from Rose, Ahmet started seeing fellow actress Selma Blair. They announced their engagement in October 2003 and were married shortly after.

"And I shamefully spent the night talking to this skag, who tried to masturbate me while a video of Doom Generation was playing in the background. I wished for a moment the girl in the movie, Rose McGowan, was here, and maybe I would let her masturbate me. I remember reading an interview with Rose about her fucked-up childhood and her father, who was the leader of some religious cult. For some reason, I feel like she would be able to relate to what I'm going through - not at the moment but in general."
- Marilyn Manson, Long Hard Road Out of Hell, pg. 261

Rose had a boyfriend at the time but was unhappy in that relationship and ended it. "It was a little messy because, as I say, I was with somebody else at the time, who I left - one, because I didn't really want to be with that person, and two, because I felt I'd had so much tragedy I needed to go off, go crazy, and maybe live on the outside for a while. That was my plan, anyways, and ironically it coincided with meeting the person who has given my life a strong foundation and a relationship in which I feel safe. It's interesting how my plan backfired in the best possible way", Rose said.

Rose moved in with Manson shortly after and went on tour with his band as the couple did not want to be apart for more than seven days. "Well, I like to say that this year I've ended up being a professional groupie. I took about 10 months off to adjust to the touring thing with Manson. I kept trying to break up with him before he went on tour because I am no man's Jerry Hall. Please. In fact, I would say I'm the one he has to worry about." Rose also starred on Marilyn Manson's music video, Coma White, released in 1998, and Manson wrote songs and painted portraits of her.

On February 12, 1999, in a bathtub surrounded by candles Manson gave Rose a beautiful ring dating back to 1930s and asked her to marry him. Despite her commitment phobia, she said yes and announced the engagement on Howard Stern's radio show on February 16, 1999. "Rose is the only girl I'd ever get married to, and I'm pretty sure I'm the only man she would marry", Manson said. The couple never set a date but they did buy a house together.

In January 2001, Rose announced her relationship to Manson was over. "There is great love, but our lifestyle difference is, unfortunately, even greater." Rose refused to talk about the break-up publicly for a while but later on implied that she couldn't deal with Manson's drug abuse. "I couldn't take his lifestyle. The drugs - more than you could imagine. I realized it wasn't a lifestyle I wanted to be married to. I have never been a rock chick." Manson himself commented: "Well you know, I'm not saying I'm happy about it, but I think that people have to live their lives and neither one of us wanted to change who we were - and I think that's the important part. In the end you've got to be happy about yourself."

Rose has said she is not in touch with Marilyn Manson anymore at all but still remembers him and their time together fondly.

Rose on Manson:
"I was at this really stupid S&M theme restaurant in New York called La Nouvelle Justine where I had to endure watching fat New Jersey people in khaki pants getting spanked by some cute waiter. So I had a foot slave who's rubbing my feet and he says, 'This old friend of mine from Florida has a really big crush on you. Do you know who Marilyn Manson is?' Three months later in L.A. at a screening of Gummo that I was later for and locked out of, I was out there cussing and kicking the door, and Manson came out. And here we are.... Happy with two dogs."

"I'd heard that Marilyn had had a crush on me since he saw my first film The Doom Generation. I thought he was weird and a bit grotesque but I was into country music at the time. When I saw him coming out of the theatre, I opened the door for him, stared him straight in the eye and said, 'I hear you have a crush on me', He looked a bit stunned then laughed. I loved the laugh and now I'm in love with the man."

"I don't think about the institution part of it as much as the idea that marrying the person you're with is the highest compliment you can pay them. I think it's an amazing thing to tell someone you want to spend everyday for the rest of your life with them. Right from the moment we've been engaged, I've felt that the invisible threads bindings us together have become even tighter. It's very sweet, actually. I can imagine being with Manson at sixty-five."

"I, to be honest, didn't really understand the level of his fame until I started going out with him. As a young woman I've learned how to have the horse blinders on when I walk down the street in life, even before I started making movies. Men can be hooting and hollering in the street, and I look straight ahead. It's kind of like that, but it is much harder. He really can't go to the store, he really can't go shopping or go to a museum. So that part of it really sucks. But, on the other side of it, we have so much fun just together. A side from the fact that we're madly in love and best friends, we both have really deviant, twisted senses of humor. He thinks I'm very colorful."

"He helps me let things go. He taught me not to let things fester inside and roll with the punches. He's got a really good attitude- he'd have to, when you think about it- about people throwing stones. But the thing with him is, he's not that different from his stage persona. It's not all fake, it's how he expresses himself. He can be really wild at home or not, just like we all can. Well, some of us."

"He's very masculine in real life. The image is exactly that, just an image. Marilyn has no skeletons in his closet and is not into any private perversions, unlike many of his critics. Marilyn parades everything in public. That's what angers the moral majority people. He says and does things in public that they fantasize about."

"It's funny because people think that we're becoming conventional, but I think it will actually give us more freedom to be crazy. The more comfortable we get with each other, the crazier we become individually, so I actually expect him to be ten times as crazy. I think this will totally probably free us both up to be way more crazy, and we're the only two people in the world that are kind of as crazy as each other, so we're perfectly compatible."

"I don't think he's a freak, and I tend to get very protective of him. He's extremely intelligent, probably one of the smartest people I've ever met. Pretty much anybody who is pro-free thought gets battered down in America. But I can't say, obviously, his vibe isn't to provoke certain reaction."

"I love him. But I need eight hours sleep a night."

Manson on Rose:
"It's funnym when I moved to Hollywood I had mentioned the only person I wanted to meet was Rose McGowan. And I met her a day later. And it was kind of ironic, and I haven't left her side since then."

"We went to this bar and she started dancing really sexy dancing to Iron Maiden, which I thought, if a girl can dance to Iron Maiden, this is the girl that I'm going to be with forever."

"Rose inspires me, she's got more balls than the Jennifer Love Hewitt's of the world, who are so watered-down and boring. I told her she should change her name to Rose 'Hate' McGowan."

"Probably the most peculiar person I know. And my best friend in the world. Probably I wouldn't say fate, but someone that I had planned on meeting when I moved to Hollywood. Things happen for a reason. Since I met her I really haven't looked back."

"We're going to get married. We just bought a house. I don't feel as though that's settling down. I think it's great that I've found somebody who respects what I do and gives me the ability to do what I want. I have someone that I trust and it's hard to find someone that you trust in this world, especially someone like me. So I feel lucky that I'm in that situation. In no way does it fell like settling down - it feels liberating to me. I think the idea of always trying to find someone you can believe in is much more painful than having that person."

"There's something very tragic about her, something very classic, in a Marilyn Monroe sort of way, that just captured me. I've never met anyone like her, a guy or a girl. And she has very extreme ups and downs - they're so extreme that they affect me as well. I think we have a great relationship, but it still has a sense of tragedy to it. Maybe that's what makes it appealing in some ways, that it just seems like it has an unhappy ending to it somewhere."