I GOT DIVORCED AFTER 23 YEARS – I WISH I’D PAID HIM MORE ATTENTION
The announcement that Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban have split after a 20-year relationship has been received with shock and sadness. The actress and her singer/songwriter husband were married for 19 years and had two children – but to me, the biggest surprise is not that this seemingly steadfast twosome have separated, but that they managed to stay together for so long.
In the febrile domains of back-to-back movies, recording albums and world tours, relationships rarely last. Kidman and Urban are mega-successful in their own right, so I doubt it’s a power imbalance that was the problem. But there’s one thing that every successful relationship requires and that is intimacy. And you can’t be intimate with someone you rarely see.
Intimacy is the pillar on which relationships are built. And it’s not just celebrities who so easily forget that fundamental truth, or let it slip away. As someone who split in my mid-50s after a 23-year relationship with the father of our son, I know too well what happens when the warmth of intimacy flies out the window to be replaced by a bitter Arctic chill – a not-bothering, a not-noticing of what’s going on for the other person, and by the worm of resentment.
If I’d paid better attention to the importance of intimacy, perhaps my marriage wouldn’t have withered away as it did. Of course the unforced intimacies of our early days when we had time for sex and easy-like Sunday morning lie-ins, for romantic dinners à deux, for walking hand-in-hand around Rome and ending up in a bar at 2 in the morning, not thinking about tomorrow, couldn’t last.
Not once we had a child and two, full-time high-powered jobs between us, him as the managing director of a printing company, me as the editor of a glossy women’s magazine. But somehow we still managed to remain intimate, thoroughly aware of each other’s needs, always offering one another praise and encouragement and being interested in what was happening for each of us at work. We were so united in our love for our son, so happy to share the chores, that to a large degree our intimacy deepened when he was very young.
Intimacy is about so much more than sex (though the importance of sex in a relationship should never be underestimated). What I’m talking about here, though, is emotional intimacy, about being attuned to the other person, about trusting them, about wanting – and being able – to share with them your private thoughts, your fears and your hopes. When you can do all these things you are connecting and you are communicating. Separation for work, and even the nature of your work, can test your capacity for the in-between work of maintaining relationships.
As time went on things between us became more rocky. I had a breakdown and two years of depressive illness. I had to step down from my high-powered role and became virtually incapacitated. My partner stepped in, heroically I’d say. But he, too, had his troubles and eventually he lost a big job and a big salary and found it hard to find his footing again.
Slowly, slowly things eroded. We were so wrapped up in our own problems that we stopped looking out for one another. When he walked in the door in the evening, I barely glanced up. I didn’t want to hear about his grievances at the end of my own difficult day, and he didn’t have the bandwidth for mine. He used to love how I looked, to comment on the way I dressed. That stopped, too. Did I look so different, or did I become invisible to him?
Then he had to get jobs out of London, jobs he didn’t want and didn’t like, but were the best he could find. For a few years that meant having to rent a flat in Cheltenham, then Leicester, only coming back at weekends. Staying in places that had none of the warmth and comforts of home. Places where he had no friends, nowhere much to go when the working day was over.
Our son was growing up, didn’t necessarily want to chat to dad in the evening when he called, was too busy with homework or listening to music or watching something on TV. He’d shake his head when I pointed at the phone and I didn’t object to his refusal. And I didn’t always have much to say either. What did happen was that my son and I became a kind of twosome, and his dad felt shut out. When he came home at the weekend, by the time we all had readjusted to one another it was time for him to go off again.
Research has shown that relationships lacking in emotional intimacy are more likely to experience an increase in conflict, reduced sexual desire and feelings of loneliness and or disconnection. Bingo. That’s exactly what we felt.
Quality time is considered to be a key ingredient for fostering intimacy. Putting away phones and engaging in active listening. Showing physical affection is so important, too. Little touches, hugs, kisses. Could I have saved our marriage if I’d paid more attention to these things? I think perhaps, yes. I wish I had. These days, 18 years after we separated, we get on so well that, although we understand how things went wrong and that a period of separation was necessary, with greater focus we both wonder if we could have sorted ourselves.
In an interview in 2021, Kidman described herself as being ‘in a very deep marriage.’ I don’t doubt it. But I suspect that the worlds-in-themselves of the movie set and the recording studio and the jets and the hotels, and then wanting to do the best for your kids when you do get home, rather than focusing on re-connecting with your partner, is a death knell to intimacy. And therefore a marriage killer, too.
2025-10-01T05:51:50Z
