Staying together for the sake of the kids can be more stressful to them than a civilised split.
Rachel O’Connor wrote in the Metro online how Coleen Nolan’s teenage daughter urged her to divorce her father as she ‘couldn’t stand’ them together.
Coleen Nolan has revealed it was her own daughter who eventually convinced her to divorce her husband.
The Loose Women panelist was divorced from second husband Ray Fensome in 2018, but admits herself they should have ended things years before then.
Speaking on Tuesday’s episode of Loose Women, the panel discussed new ITV drama Our House, starring Martin Compston and Tuppence Middleton, who play a separated married couple.
The series aired its first episode on Monday night to a positive reception, which led to Loose Women host Christine Lampard asking how long a couple should continue to live together after a split.
Coleen, 56, recalled her drawn-out separation from husband Ray, and said that by trying to make their marriage work, ‘we tried staying in the same house probably two or three years longer than we should’.
Eventually, after years of acting ‘like lodgers living in the same house,’ Coleen’s then 15-year-old daughter told her parents to split up.
‘It was actually Ciara, when she was 15, who said “I think you should leave,”; Coleen revealed.
Ciara had added: ‘I’m going to love both of you always, but I can’t stand the way you are in the house.’
The singer explained that she didn’t want her kids ‘to be from a broken home’: Coleen had two sons, Jake and Shane from her marriage to first husband Shane Ritchie, and had daughter Ciara with Ray in 2001.
In hindsight, Coleen said she sees now that it wasn’t ‘a great way to bring kids up,’ as ‘they would have grown up thinking that was a normal relationship and it wasn’t’.
‘[The kids are] seeing couples and they’re holding hands and having a laugh, and then they come in and see me on one end of the couch and him on the other and that’s not good,’ the presenter added.
While Coleen and Ray took several years before eventually calling quits on their marriage, fellow Loose Women panelist Janet Street-Porter took a different approach, as she opened up on her own divorce on the show.
She recalled during one of her marriages – Janet has been married four times – she and her new husband decided within 48 hours that ‘it was a big mistake’.
‘I’ve got a photo of me washing the kitchen floor the morning after the wedding party and more or less you can read on my face “I shouldn’t have done that”.
However, as this was ‘back in the day’ and Janet didn’t want to be judged because ‘my marriage was a flop within 48 hours’, she and her husband lived in the one-bedroom house for another six months.
‘We had quite an amicable separation but in the same house,’ she said, adding that when he eventually moved out to a hotel he joked that room service ‘didn’t answer back.
The show, which also featured an interview with Good Morning Britain’s Susanna Reid, paid tribute to the panel’s ‘sisterhood’ dynamic, after the programme was hit with rumours of a rift between some of the hosts.
Also on Tuesday, Coleen and Loose Women co-star Gloria Hunniford appeared on ITV’s Lorraine and emphasised how dull the popular programme would be if the ladies were always in agreement.
Coleen said: ‘It would be a very boring show if we all agreed on everything.’
She insisted however: ‘It ends at the desk, it never carries on afterwards.
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