Chloe: “James and I have considered couples’ therapy”
Despite looking like the perfect pairing, Chloe Madeley says her marriage was severely tested during lockdown, as she shares her thoughts on starting a family
They were once so lovedup that she boasted about having sex every day. But after five months of just the two of them stuck at home during lockdown, Chloe Madeley reveals there have been some tense moments between her and her husband, former rugby ace James Haskell.
She tells Closer, “We’re both strong characters and that’s what attracted us to each other and keeps us together, but it can also be a ticking time bomb and cause mayhem! As soon as lockdown hit, James got out the Xbox, and all day, every day, that’s all he did. At first I thought it was sweet that he was relaxing, but by week five, I flipped. All my friends said the same about their partners, and it irritated them, too. It was like having a teenager living in the house!
“James would say I am an OCD freak – which I am. He’d put something down, and I’d put it back where it belonged. And he would say, ‘I put it there because I wanted to use it’. I know it’s an annoying habit.
“James loves to share everything on his YouTube channel, but there were definitely days in lockdown when I said, ‘No, just leave me alone and put the camera away’, when we were getting on each other’s nerves and having a s*** day.
“I need quiet to work, and James is the opposite. He likes music in the house. When we go to sleep at night, he likes to listen to podcasts and audiobooks, whereas I like silence.
“We are very well suited, but we have still had days where being around each other is torture and we need a minute apart. No relationship is perfect, and it can take quite a lot of work sometimes. We haven’t got a picture-perfect marriage – we are a real couple with real stuff going on. People shouldn’t believe what they see on social media.”
Chloe, 33, is close to her famous parents – TV’s Richard Madeley, 64, and Judy Finnigan, 72 – and spoke to them every day during lockdown. She says, “As soon as two households were allowed to meet up, we went over, and as I’d missed both their birthdays, I took them some food from Fortnum & Mason. But it was so hard not to hug them!”
SEX SECRETS
Chloe and James, 35, have just launched their podcast, Couples Quarantine, in which they are refreshingly honest about a range of personal issues from their private life, including annoying habits and even sex secrets. They have always had a very playful relationship, but Chloe admits that, at times, they have struggled to communicate during the pandemic, and they even discussed having couples’ therapy.
“I have suggested it to James before, and he’s said, ‘When and if we need to, we can go’. I don’t think we need to do it yet, but we happily would. If we felt like there was something we couldn’t fix on our own, we would not hesitate to seek help. I think it’d be really helpful for communication.
“We’ve been together for six years, so we are used to each other, but when you are together day in and day out for five months, you can’t escape. I think going for a walk or even just into another room helped – and talking things through.”
The couple met in 2014, when James invited Chloe to be the face of the female line of his fitness supplements, and started dating shortly after. She revealed she was “speechless” when he got down on one knee during a trip to Paris in 2018. They wed later that year.
MATERNAL
She says, “We’d never break up. We love each other to bits, and we don’t like being away from each other for more than a couple of days. We’re extensions of each other at this point, after spending so much time together. We have weekly date nights with no phones, no work, just James and me at a nice restaurant with a nice bottle of wine. It keeps us feeling romantic about each other. During lockdown we had a ‘What the hell day’, where we hung out in the garden with a magnum of rosé, some good music and a BBQ.”
Chloe is a personal fitness trainer and the author of three best-selling fitness books, and has almost finished writing her fourth.
She says she has never felt better than she does in her thirties. She says, “I train for an hour in our gym six days a week. I love weightlifting – it makes me joyful – and I do a bit of cardiovascular fitness. If I’m in a fat-loss phase, I’ll bring my calories down over a period of time – and if I’m not, I’ll simply enjoy my food. When I started, I was more extreme, but after nine years, I’ve come to a good place where I train hard and I am fit and healthy and loving life.”
And she’s got no plans to start a family yet. Chloe says, “Motherhood can be hard, which is why I haven’t jumped the gun and got pregnant. James and I are really into our careers, so the thought of having a baby is quite overwhelming, but I love babies, and I am maternal. We’re thinking in the next year or so. We don’t want to miss out on parenthood, but not right now – we need to be really well prepared.”
She laughs, “We did think, ‘maybe’, at the beginning of lockdown, but then we thought, ‘No, let’s just get drunk in the garden!’”
● Couples Quarantine is available on all good podcast platforms, with new episodes released every Tuesday