CHAPTER 13

HOW DID IT ALL GO WRONG?

‘If you are going through hell, keep going.’

(Author unknown)

Since turning professional, our fortunes had turned around. After years of scrimping and saving, we were now financially stable, well able to start treating ourselves to luxury brands when the fancy took us. New sunglasses? Gucci. New luggage? Mulberry. (And you can imagine how satisfying that was!)

We had even bought ourselves a flat – a newly built penthouse flat in Wallington, Surrey, with two floors, three bedrooms, three bathrooms, a huge lounge, dining space and kitchen. So much space. Brendan and I had gone through so much stress and hard work to get to this point in our lives. It had been a long journey. But now, as I sat there, alone in our brand-new apartment, close to tears, I asked myself over and over again, ‘How did it all go so wrong?’ and I realized the true meaning of that old saying: ‘Money won’t buy you happiness.’ Now every time I spoke to Brendan it seemed to provoke a yet another argument. Often I’d be 200 miles away, training, and every time he said he was just off to meet his Strictly partner and her friends it broke my heart. Once he even said they’d just called his mum in New Zealand.

They’d just called his mum in New Zealand. ‘Why?’ I thought. ‘Why on earth would you need to call his mum so she could speak to her?

Another time when all the dancers had been invited to a party and I was so excited about going with Brendan, he told me he was going with his celebrity dance partner instead! When I asked him why, he said they’d done so well in the competition that week, ‘we wanted to celebrate our success together.’ He was going with her and expected me to go on my own. I just couldn’t make any sense of it. It was as if he’d slapped me on the face and expected me to say that I hope he hadn’t hurt his hand!

Humiliated

I didn’t want to involve my family as I knew how worried they’d be. And anyway, I was still hoping that we would manage to sort everything out ourselves.

But it was difficult to keep it a secret from my Mor as we are very close – always have been and always will be. We spoke every day, and no matter how hard I tried to hide it on the phone, she could tell something was up. Perhaps both she and my Far had detected the sadness in my voice. I don’t know, I just know that they knew that I wasn’t doing very well, and they decided to come over to watch one of the early shows live.

It should have been one of my proudest moments, having my parents sitting in the front row of the studio theatre. Instead I was filled with shame and humiliation. Why? Because, of all the shows to chose to do it, Brendan chose that particular one to congratulate his partner for their performance by kissing her on the lips. Right in front of the audience, and right in front of my parents and his future parents-in-law – he was kissing the woman who I now thought of as my arch-rival for his love.

My heart was lurching and I felt sick, desperately hoping that my parents hadn’t seen it. I knew it would hurt them to see Brendan doing something that they knew would upset me. But they did see it – and so did everyone watching, including journalists. I could almost see them sitting at their computers writing articles about the oodles of obvious chemistry between Brendan and his partner. Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe it was ‘just a kiss’, just a ‘well-done’ gesture. But I couldn’t stop asking myself if it was more than that.

The sixth season of Strictly that I was in held some very proud moments, but I never felt the need to kiss any of my partners on the lips, not even when Tom Chambers and I won it.

What made it worse was that it was totally out of character for Brendan to behave like that. I was seeing him with new eyes and thinking, ‘Who is this guy?’

And then I had to suffer the mortification of my parents bringing it up after the show – saying what I was thinking, ‘That seemed rather unnecessary …’

At rock bottom emotionally

And that’s when it all caught up with me. It was just like the time when Mor asked if I was happy when I was 18 and in Copenhagen, living with Klavs’s family. I broke down and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. I had hit my emotional rock bottom – I have never felt so low in my entire life. I felt humiliated, confused and hurt to my very core.

I couldn’t believe things were going to end like this – we’d been so close for so long that I couldn’t accept this was the beginning of the end between us. I was still desperate to salvage what we’d had, because it had meant the world to me.

But every time I tried to get Brendan to open up, we got nowhere. He’d just repeat the same old words: ‘I can’t deal with this until the show’s over.’

Who knows what he was thinking, I certainly didn’t. Maybe he really was just focused on winning the trophy, confused, caught up in the whole thing and enjoying the limelight, thinking that I should just give him time, step aside and wait for me to get my head round what he was going through. I couldn’t. I was so hurt; I needed him to tell me that everything would be OK again.

I had certainly never known jealousy like this before – but then nor had I ever had to contend with watching my boyfriend – no, not my boyfriend, my fiancé – spending all his time with another woman, and what’s more a woman he appeared to adore!

What now?

I was knocked out of the competition in week three, but the Open British Championships in Blackpool were around the corner, and we’d always planned to go back and compete there together. After all, that was our world and the place where we’d created our careers, got our next engagements and our bread-and-butter jobs. I assumed that although we were doing the show we’d still be going back to compete, and that we’d put on a united front and show the dance world that we weren’t turning our back on it just because of a TV show.

But now Brendan had suddenly lost interest. It’s hard to explain how his character, how everything that motivated him, seemed to have changed. He would always have been pushing to do the Open British: not to do it would have been unthinkable to him.

It was with something of a chill that I remembered the dancer who’d stood up at that first pre-Strictly meeting, and said that if the dancers on the show became celebrities it would make it difficult for them to return to their normal lives. ‘What happens then?’ she’d asked.

‘What happens now?’ I was asking myself.

Nobody thought that would happen – but it had. And it had happened to Brendan. Now, instead of honouring our commitment to each other and our career as a couple, he wanted to stay in London to practise with his celebrity partner – because, unlike me and the lovely David Dickinson, they were still in with a chance.

It seemed bizarre to me for him to place so much importance on the show though. At this point we had no idea how it would progress. It could have been a one-off, so I was far more concerned about keeping our other jobs and contacts happy so that we had work to keep us going after Strictly Come Dancing had finished.

Bye bye, Brendan

I begged him to discuss things with me and yes, I admit it, my needy behaviour was coming out in all its glory – not something I’m proud of. But I really wanted for us to sit down and talk about our relationship and what to do about Blackpool. I simply couldn’t take it any longer. I was falling apart.

I didn’t feel like I could talk to anyone who wasn’t a friend of both of us or involved with the dance world in some way. But I couldn’t cope any longer. Not knowing where I stood with my partner – whether I even still had a partner, not just on the dance floor but as a lover. Our careers, our lives, were intertwined.

I didn’t want to give in and admit we were no longer working as a team. I simply wouldn’t admit or accept that the strong bond we’d had no longer seemed to exist. I felt totally and utterly defeated. My life was in turmoil and I was in bits, I just wanted to curl up in a ball and cry.

I lost my appetite and I just felt totally stressed out. But even so, I put on my show-business smile and headed north for Blackpool on my own. Brendan had agreed to come up and watch the competition later on in the week, but he wouldn’t compete. He preferred to stay on in London and train for Strictly. Hoping that he would give me a call to say he’d changed his mind and that he would come up earlier after all, I went along with it.

Before I went to Blackpool, I made one more attempt to fix things over one last conversation in our spanking new penthouse living room. I told him I felt so low I thought I was close to having a complete breakdown. I may as well have been talking to a brick wall. ‘We can’t have this conversation until the show’s over,’ he said.

I took a deep breath. ‘If we can’t talk about this in Blackpool at the latest, then I can’t see what else I can do but to walk out the door and never come back.’

I couldn’t live in this limbo. I was desperate for him to say, ‘No don’t go! Let’s sit down and talk it through.’ I so, so wanted to hear those words, because they would have been the balm I needed to soothe my wounded heart. But he didn’t say anything – just that he couldn’t deal with this now.

I knew in myself though that once I walked out the door it would be finished. As far as I’m concerned, when something is over, it’s over. It’s time to move on, however hard that may be.

Yet again, he said he couldn’t take any decisions about how he felt and that he wanted to wait until the show had finished. I told him that I felt so broken, sad and upset that I just couldn’t do it anymore and that what he was saying wasn’t good enough for me. I needed him to cool things with his dance partner, although of course I knew they’d have to finish the competition together. I still wanted him to win. I just didn’t want us to throw away everything we had worked for.

Even at that point, I still thought that we stood a chance if he dealt with it and made me part of his journey again – just like he always had. He asked me to bear with him until the series came to an end, when he would talk about things and let me know how he felt. But I couldn’t even watch Strictly anymore, it was too painful. And when we had to go on a sister talk show with Justin Lee Collins and all play happy families, I felt nauseated.

Media frenzy

The press went crazy with rumours after the first live show and not long after I had to move out of our apartment. But before I did, journalists were constantly buzzing the entryphone, trying to get me to comment on stories about us in the papers. They knew I was in the flat – why else would they be pressing that blasted buzzer – but even so, one paper had it that I had already moved out because of the chemistry between Brendan and his partner, and all the rumours of an affair between them. It was so hurtful. I hadn’t moved out at all! I was still there – curled up and crying in the corner of the couch, feeling so alone.

They managed to get into the building and started to push notes under the door, asking me to sell them my side of the story. They even tried to call my parents in Denmark for their comments.

I had no idea what they expected me to say. But, whatever it was, I didn’t want to say it! So I called a friend and asked her to pick me up. I just needed to get out of there. I wasn’t interested in talking to anyone about what was going on. How could I? I didn’t even know what was going on myself!

That evening my lovely friend took me for a Chinese meal with some of her friends to try and cheer me up, but it didn’t really work because, soon after we got to the restaurant, my phone started ringing. It was Brendan, phoning with his celeb dance partner, from a cab they were sharing after their Strictly practice.

He sounded agitated. He knew the press was on my back, but I knew it wasn’t my back that he wanted to protect. It was his and hers. ‘We think it’s best if you don’t talk to the newspapers about all this,’ he said.

‘We think it’s best!’ Suddenly they were the couple and I was the outsider who had to keep her mouth shut. What about Brendan and I sitting down and trying to discuss what the press was doing to us? Where was Brendan’s loyalty to me? He was my best friend, the only person in the world I could turn to. Now I felt as if he had turned on me, and it was as if he’d pulled my heart out and stamped on it.

All I knew was that I had to get away. So I went home to Denmark, leaving Brendan to get on with the show until the final night when we were all expected to be there. Well, to be fair, it was no surprise when Brendan and his partner won. I’m enough of a professional to know that they were good. But as I stood there, congratulating them, it felt as if I was talking to someone I didn’t know, let alone the man I’d shared my life with and had been due to marry!

I was really proud of his achievement but so deeply hurt I could hardly hold myself together. All the other contestants were really supportive and I tried to play it cool to make it less awkward for everybody else. I think I managed it.

Big girls do cry

After that, I went straight back to Denmark, away from it all. Hanging out in my sister’s house gave me the peace and calm to confront the pain. The grief I felt was, I later understood, no different from the grief I felt when we lost our dog Besy, when I was 13. I’d wept uncontrollably then; I wept uncontrollably now.

I kept on telling myself to stop feeling so sad when there were so many people around the world going through far worse things. There were wars going on. What’s a little heartache? What right had I to be this upset? But Jeanet said, ‘Sis, it’s OK to be sad and cry. Everything is relative, and you need to get this out of your system.’

It was as if she gave me permission to cry, to be sad, to grieve for my loss, and I will always love her for that. She wasn’t just my sister, she was an amazing friend through that time. She never judged me. Never judged my relationship. And never questioned the situation I was in. She just let me figure it all out in my own time, while being there for me.

Over the summer there would be many chances for Brendan to come to see me and try to put things right; but he never did. I can’t say how I would have reacted if he had, or even if it would have been too late. It’s irrelevant now. But the bottom line is that he decided to stay in the UK to do a DVD with his celebrity partner that summer instead.

‘I’m not really bothered!’

For years Brendan and I had been really keen to be considered good enough to represent England in the World Championship. And guess what! While I was staying with my sister in Copenhagen after the Strictly final, that invitation finally came through. Not just that. We were also asked to perform at the Night of 100 Stars, one of the most glamorous and prestigious evenings in the ballroom world. I called Brendan to discuss it, imagining he’d still want to go ahead, even if only as professional partners. It was, after all, something we’d dreamed of for so long. His answer? ‘I’m not really bothered!’ I was shocked and numb at the same time. I hung up the phone and realized that this was it. We really were through. Then I took the book containing the business cards from all our contacts around the world and threw it in the bin. I knew I would be starting over, and this time I’d be alone. I had lost my partner, my home and my career, all in one fell swoop. I felt as if the rug into which my entire life had been woven had been pulled from beneath my feet.

The only way is up

While I was trying to pull myself together back in Copenhagen, I thought that a visit to the gym would boost my spirits. But as I stood on the StairMaster – a piece of equipment I normally enjoyed using – I found I had no strength at all, not even for one step. This is when I knew I really was at the lowest I had ever been. I was emotionally and physically drained! I had to jump off the machine and just go home.

Back at Jeanet’s house I realized that if I was that down (and believe me I was that down) there was only one way to go and that was up. I had to dig deep but eventually something clicked inside me. I found an inner strength I didn’t even know I had. It was a turning point, and, however sad I was, I decided then and there that each day I would walk outside in the fresh air, taking one step at a time to build up my strength until I was running a good 20 minutes. Bearing in mind that I’d always hated running, this was definitely a new beginning. Every step I took I saw as being one more step away from that sad situation with Brendan, and one step closer to finding myself and my confidence again.

I now love walking and running and find it extremely empowering. It’s grounding – almost meditative – and it will always be one of my favourite ways to get a perspective on things, especially if I’m upset and want to get rid of all the negative energy that creates.

Gaining strength

Rock bottom is a sad and lonely place to be. Being there may make you feel broken, that doesn’t mean to say it’s a hopeless place to be. Knowing now that you really are as low as you can go, means you can now start working your way up again.

In my case, having parted from my dance partner, business partner and lover, I started thinking about how I would put the pieces back together again and also how I would create a career for myself. I find it so fascinating that it sometimes takes something so sudden, explosive and surprising to wake us up from the trance in which we sometimes live, and give us a chance to take a proper good look at ourselves.

I know a lot of people are quick to blame everyone and everything around them, and I think somewhere in my grieving period I had a moment of self pity when I asked Brendan how he could do this to me. That was a real ‘poor me’ moment! But I started reading a lot of motivational books and I listened to hypnosis CDs from Anthony Robbins and Paul McKenna to build up my shattered confidence, and it wasn’t too long before I pulled myself out of ‘Poor Me City’. Trust me, this is not a place to linger if you want to find true happiness within. I used to wake up every day and wonder if I would ever feel truly happy again. I really couldn’t imagine how it used to feel or how long it would take for me to see the light at the end of the tunnel – but I now know that when we are in the ‘poor me’ state of mind we are not attractive to ourselves or the world around us. If you don’t believe me, just think of the times you have been hanging out with friends who have pulled a ‘poor me’. How they have complained about this and that, and how you yearned to say, ‘Come on! Take a look at yourself!’ There are lots of things you can do for yourself, but sitting and complaining about what everyone else is doing wrong is not going to improve your situation at all. In fact you will probably just attract even more bad news into your life. Remember how earlier I spoke about how the law of attraction works? When we notice ‘poor me’ popping up, it’s a sign that it’s time to take action.

I found an inner strength I didn’t even know I had

LEARN TO SAY ‘YES!’

I took inspiration from a great improv acting exercise called ‘Yes let’s’ and you can adopt this simple and effective attitude right now.

When I was going through my ‘poor me’ stage after my break with Brendan, all I wanted to do was to hide and lick my wounds, but after wallowing in self pity for a while, I told myself it was time to pull myself together.

I think the final push was when I had gone on holiday with my family to help cheer myself up and cried for most of it. Not only was I heartbroken, but I also had come down with tonsillitis because of all of the stress. I remember crying and telling Mor that she seriously didn’t understand how low I was, when clearly she did. I know now that anyone who’s been heartbroken or bereaved would understand what I was going through, but at the time I thought, like most people do, that no one could possibly understand the pain I was in.

Anyway, when I got home from holiday I thought, ‘Enough of this self pity already, pull yourself together, girl.’ I think I’d read a book called Yes Man and it had inspired me to start saying, ‘Yes!’

When friends invited me out I started saying, ‘Yes!’

When colleagues suggested an outing to a band or event that sounded random to me I said, ‘Yes!’

If a friend asked me to a dinner party full of strangers I said, ‘Yes!’

I even challenged myself to go out and have dinner on my own in restaurants. The alternative was to sit at home alone and feel sad about everything that had gone wrong.

When you come out of a relationship you often think that you can’t do something on your own and that all your friends are couples, so you’ll never meet anyone again. I thought that way too for some time, but then I thought, ‘Says who?’

If you are bored of sitting at home feeling sorry for yourself, then start getting involved in the things around you. When somebody invites you along to something say, ‘Yes!’ even if at first you think that’s not really your kind of thing. Saying, ‘Yes!’ has led me to meeting so many interesting people and making new friends, too, and most important of all it got me out of the self-pity bubble and back on the track toward happiness.

This attitude is one that I ask many of my business clients to adopt too. It’s a great way to keep creativity going in the office and when someone comes up with an idea it’s much more positive to give them a ‘Yes!’ and then add to it, instead of shooting them down with a ‘No!’

Yes!’ keeps the creative juices flowing.