PETE TELLS EMILY ‘YOU ARE BET TER OFF WITHOUT ME!’
Star makes a shock marriage confession…
Peter Andre has opened up about a harrowing time in his life that saw him push away his wife, Emily Macdonagh.
Speaking about the death of his brother, Andrew, Pete said that he went into a dark place where he ‘shut out’ Emily from his life.
His frank confession came as he was talking with Phillip Schofield on This Morning. Asked if it was true that he had told Emily she would be better off without him, Pete replied, ‘I did.’
An ultimatum
Andrew, the oldest of Pete’s five brothers and sisters, died in December 2012 of kidney cancer, aged 54.
Remembering that difficult time, Pete, 43, admitted that it caused strain on his relationship with Emily. ‘I thought, ‘There’s no way she’s going to stay with me,’’ he said. ‘She would talk to me and I would walk in the other room and just shut the door. I shut her out completely.’ The star explained it was then that he gave Emily his ultimatum. ‘I said to her, ‘You’ve got two options, you can either go do what you have to do, let me get through this and then when I get through this, if you want to talk, let’s talk. Or you can stick by me.’ And I really thought she’d say, ‘Do you know what? I just need some time out.’ Thankfully for Pete, Emily was having none of it. ‘She said, ‘No, there isn’t two options, there’s only one. I’m staying with you,’ Pete added. He first met Emily, 27, who recently graduated
‘She would talk to me and would walk in I the other room and just shut the door’
as a doctor, back in 2012. They began dating, and married three years later.
But it wasn’t an easy start for the pair, with Andrew’s death coming soon after they began dating. ‘This happened in the honeymoon period, the first six months,’ Pete said. ‘The time that everything’s supposed to be incredible. I hope that one day she needs me and I’m there for her, because she really stuck by me. I plummeted, I went straight back to where I was 10 years ago when I had all the depression and panic attacks. In no way would I want people to go, ‘Oh, poor guy.’ I don’t want that. What I want to say is that I came through it. Millions of families go through it every day – not just anxiety, I’m talking about losing a family member. You do sort of learn to live without. But the hole is always there.’
Such a close family
Pete, who’s dad to Amelia, two, as well as Junior, 11, and Princess, nine, with ex-wife Katie Price, and who is expecting another baby with Emily in a few months, has always been close to his family, who he grew up with in Australia. ‘To know that that part of you is gone…’ Pete said. ‘My mum always said, ‘If any one of my fingers got cut off, would it matter which one? Would I feel any less pain whichever one it was? All my children are the same.’ And I feel that with my brothers, my sister, my mum and dad. We’re so close that the pain is as great whoever it is and it happened to be our eldest brother and it tore us apart. ‘We have not to this day, nearly four years later, sat down as a family and talked about it. We just sort of move it away because it is still so raw.’