Even Holly Willoughby rows with her husband. Here's why
This Morning presenter Holly Willoughby is riding high at the moment, with a best-selling book, Reflections, a new lifestyle website, Wylde Moon, showcasing her love of healing and crystals, and even a part in TV favourite Midsomer Murders.
Fans love her, and she's always smiling, perhaps because she has plenty to smile about.
Even sunny-tempered Holly, however, can snap - and she's revealed that it all comes down to an argument common to many couples.
The presenter, 40, is well known for her insistence on privacy when it comes to her family, TV producer husband Dan, who she married in 2007, and children Harry, 12, Belle, 10, and Chester, seven. Holly has stringently avoided parading them on red carpets or giving 'at home' interviews, despite her fame, and seldom talks about them publicly, to preserve their private lives.
In a rare interview with Zoe Ball, she said this week, "I have a very happy relationship with my husband. I love him, I still fancy him - which is fantastic.
"I'm very blessed in many, many ways."
But she has also revealed that her recent journey into alternative therapy, which began when she presented I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! In Australia in 2018, turned her into "one angry woman".
“I love anger… I never used to," she said. "Once I started to look into it I thought, I’m not sure this (exploration) is going to work because I began to feel angry.
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“My husband was like, ‘You need to back away from the meditation because you’re one angry woman!’
“I was experiencing strong emotions, instead of being in this middle ground. I was feeling strong emotions for the first time.
“It was a really powerful way to find out what was behind my feelings. Anger can pull you forward."
She added that she before she began to question her emotions, she "felt numbed and a bit adrift,” adding: “I wasn’t unhappy but I felt I was missing out on something.
“The busier I was and the more plates I kept spinning, the less time I had to sit in silence and listen to myself.
“We give ourselves high fives for multitasking. People say, ‘I don’t know how you do it’ and you think, ‘I know’.
“I was quite happy on the hamster wheel. I never crashed, I never fell off. But you can’t sustain that forever.”
Seeing a therapist, she went on, "I was unravelling and unplugging myself, taking a long, hard look into dark corners and the range of emotions I felt – good and bad – was huge.
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“Once the plaster was ripped off I felt so angry. Anything that happened to me – for example, someone underestimating me – I felt massively. Someone said, ‘It’s a hormonal thing’, but it wasn’t, it’s just that I had taken off a filter.”
Perhaps it wasn't surprising that she and Dan fell out as a result. Holly explains in Reflections:
"If I’m watching something on TV and my husband suddenly asks, ‘Why are you watching this s***?’, it’ll spark something deep inside and I will get disproportionately angry about it."
Having explored her feelings in full, she adds, she realises that in fact, it's not the TV she's angry about - it's what Dan's response suggests.
"I’m actually angry because I subconsciously feel as though someone’s trying to control what I’m doing," says Holly.
Her fascination with alternative therapies has led her to try crystal healing, meditation, kinesiology, and 'gong baths.' She admitted this week in an interview with You Magazine, "there is an opinion of people who are into crystals or meditate – a definite sense of wackiness. But for me, it feels right."
She also explained that she enjoys at-home 'sound baths,' created by playing glass or metal bowls at different frequencies and supposed to have a calming effect, .
"‘I get out the sound bowls and play, while the cat walks all over me," she laughed.
Maybe like many long-term couples, the secret of Holly and Dan's happiness - despite those rows over the remote - is maintaining a good sense of humour.
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