Some British institutions you take for granted, don’t you? Fish and chips on Fridays; Strictly Come Dancing; Tess Daly and Vernon Kay.
In a bombshell dual announcement on Instagram on Friday, the couple announced they’re separating after 23 years of marriage – and I, for one, am gutted. To me, Tess and Vernon were the quintessential TV power couple. Forget Richard and Judy or Ant and Dec – Tess, 57, and Vernon, 52, were the everyman duo offering us a nice, attainable sense of relationship realism.
They were a couple of goals with a small splash of pizzazz; proof that even when there are hiccups – such as in 2010, when their marriage survived a sexting scandal (Vernon admitted sending explicit messages to five women but said the couple were “working through it”) – you can still come out on top, until now.
Suddenly, like so many of us who have been in decades-long relationships (myself included), the couple are going their separate ways, and said they were doing so “amicably”. Yet in their public statement, I noticed something revealing.
“This has not been an easy choice, but it comes from a place of mutual understanding and a shared desire for what is best for both of us,” they wrote. “We remain great friends and most importantly, fully committed to our roles as loving and supportive parents, which will always be our priority.”
Which all sounds very grown-up and sensible: the kids come first, whatever happens. It’s a theme Vernon touched on in a recent interview with The Times. He talked about parenting Phoebe, 21 and Amber, 17, and said “our relationship with them is changing”, adding: “Communication is everything.”
We can’t know from the outside what Vernon and Tess’s family life is like, or why they’ve split now. But taken alongside the couple’s statement about their “priority” always being the kids, and given what I know from my own experience, I think it hints at a universal truth that too many of us fail to realise.
Raising children is a rollercoaster at the best of times, and it changes where your love life ranks in the grand scheme of things – it’s inevitable. Gone are “date nights” – unless you can find a babysitter – but even then, you’re so exhausted that you fall asleep at 9pm. We also know that stress affects everything from our health to sleep to libido, which isn’t great when you consider that being a parent mainly consists of worrying about your children.
And while we often like to think of the lives we lead as romantic partners as being totally separate from the one we lead as parents, the truth is that nothing is more likely to affect your love life than how you are relating to your kids.
Relationships are like house plants – to survive, you need to water them. And by the time you notice they are dry, parched and thirsty because you’ve been so caught up cooking fish fingers or changing nappies, it can already be too late.
On having kids, my entire world centred around them. That’s the same as so many parents, particularly mothers, who we know carry the bulk of the domestic load – one US study found mothers manage seven in 10 household tasks, even while working full-time.
Some of that was out of necessity; I had a baby who was unwell for her first few years of life, and the adage that “you’re only as happy as your least happy child” was true. Every time my daughter was admitted to hospital, it was like living a half-life – a numb, dissociative ordeal that left little room for recovery (for myself, for my marriage) when we got out.
Having a child (particularly when they’re ill) is so seismic, so transcendent, so utterly obliterating to your sense of self – and, yes, your relationship – that it can turn you into a different person altogether. It takes up all the space, leaving you with barely any room to breathe. Parenthood, to me, feels inherently sacrificial – and it can be extraordinarily difficult to maintain a romantic bond as well, however loving it is.
I have friends whose relationships didn’t survive the loss of a child, friends who are divorced because their partners couldn’t follow them down the dark and difficult paths of postnatal depression. Friends survived the early, tricky toddler years only to falter and stumble, irrevocably, when their children became teenagers.
For me, the opposite was true: things have never been better at home than they are now that my children are older. Once the spectre of childhood illness was in the past and the dust settled on my divorce, I became best friends with my teenage daughter – and we’re having a blast. We have sleepovers, movie nights and share everything. I feel less exhausted and have more energy for her and her younger brother – and for myself.
Ultimately, we don’t know what Vernon and Tess have had to contend with. There are a million reasons why long-term relationships end. But one thing that really rings true to me from their statement is that happiness at home really does revolve around the kids. And in my experience, it can make or break your love life, too.
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