Coleen Nolan held back tears as she said her divorce from her husband of 10 years, Ray Fensome, has been “really hard”.
The Loose Women panellist appeared on the ITV programme after she revealed in the Daily Mirror, where she acts as an agony aunt, that the couple were no longer able to make their marriage work.
Speaking for the first time since sharing the news, she said: “It’s been really hard, and it’s still really fresh and we’ve only just filed, he’s only just moved out.
'It is really sad but it happens. This is just a new chapter' – @NolanColeen bravely talks about ending her marriage after 10 years pic.twitter.com/pRJ6X8TkH9
— Loose Women (@loosewomen) February 7, 2018
“I said at the beginning of last year we were having issues but hopefully we were going to sort them out, and we have really, really tried. We were never ones to go ‘Oh, we’re having problems, let’s call it a day’ – we both tried.
“It gets to the point where you think, you know, we tried, it’s not working. Life has done that and we can’t get it back together.”
Nolan continued: “For the sake of our future happiness and our kids, especially Ciara, who’s mine and Ray’s daughter, it gets to a point, being an agony aunt I get these letters all the time from women who are in very similar situations and I was giving them advice, sometimes when you’ve tried everything, it’s OK, it’s not a failure to say ‘We tried – move on’.
“As I was saying it, I was thinking ‘I need to start listening to my own advice’. I can say it to them because I’m not emotionally attached, so I had to listen to my own advice.”
Nolan, 52, appeared visibly upset as she talked, admitting that she does not “want to cry”.
“It is really sad but I just happened and instead of sitting here, or staying with someone because I’m scared of being on my own, I’m nearly 53, do I want to be on my own at 53?
“I’ve kind of turned it round and gone ‘It’s just a new chapter’ and that’s exciting in itself for him and for me.”
She added that she finds it “difficult to lie” and that, following her sister Bernie’s death in 2013 and her other sister Linda being diagnosed with secondary cancer, she “put things into perspective”.
Nolan said in the newspaper article that she was sad to announce the split after “much hard work and many efforts” to save the relationship.
She wrote: “It’s hard to imagine that so much could have changed from that day in 2008 when we married.
“But a decade on and it’s now clear I was wrong. There is too much dividing me and Ray. We can’t go back.
“And my future is going to be very different to the one I’d imagined back then.”