So often, when a marriage falls apart in the public eye, all the attention is focused on the woman in the equation, especially when infidelity plays its part. The wronged wife. The new love. The battle between two, often furious, females.
But what’s it like to be the man in the middle of such a storm?
It is something I’ve been thinking about recently, as actress Alice Evans, 53, the estranged wife of Hornblower star Ioan Gruffudd, 48, vents her anger, despair and heartache through social media towards her famous husband, who is now in a relationship with actress Bianca Wallace, 30.
It’s a situation that has certainly struck a raw nerve with me, enduring as I have decades of very public acrimony with not one but two warring ex-wives. And while I feel genuinely sorry for both women involved in the Ioan saga, I also wonder how he is feeling.
My journey through a field of landmines to reach my current state of happiness with my fourth wife, Jelena (pictured together), was nothing less than surviving a war zone
Does he suffer guilt and self-recrimination for his role in all this pain, as I did? No doubt there is some significant hurt to see the woman he used to love now so unhappy.
After all, you once shared the limelight together and spoke about your love and professional respect for each other in glossy magazines, as I once did with both of my ex-wives — and meant it, wholeheartedly.
Yet for all the past love, perhaps Ioan can’t help but feel, as I did, that his ex is struggling to let go of the past. Despite assumptions, men do feel as many complex emotions as women when a marriage ends.
I saw both my marriages as being in a terminal decline when I stumbled across and fell in love with my wives’ replacements during long absences from home, as Ioan seems to have done with Bianca while filming in Australia.
But I must admit that during the first flush of new romance, my dominant feelings were excitement and euphoria, which largely washed away the distress of a broken marriage.
To this day, my exes and I exist on fragile ceasefires — something perhaps exacerbated by the fact that, as with Ioan, the women each time were younger than my wives, which may have heightened their rage and hurt.
A marriage that fails in the public eye is not a pretty sight. My journey through a field of landmines to reach my current state of happiness with my fourth wife, Jelena, was nothing less than surviving a war zone.
My first short marriage ended with little more than a whimper in the mid-1970s, with a daughter, Nicola, now 47. A long-term live-in relationship soon followed that lasted six years. When those partnerships failed, there was no drama, no stress. And no bad blood.
My second wife, Debby, was an altogether different story. She was an air stewardess I met on a flight during the summer of 1984, three years after I joined ITN as an ambitious reporter.
(Soon after, I became ITN’s award-winning correspondent in the Middle East — an upward trajectory that led to me being headhunted by CNN.)
By the time the seat-belt signs went off on that British Airways shuttle flight to Manchester, Debby had already told the cabin crew she had met the man she was going to marry.
And we did get married in 1985 and had a daughter, Brooke, now 32. But over time the marriage became a cracked vessel because we had been steadily drifting apart.
It seemed to me that Debby found it hard to be left alone for the long periods I was away on assignments, and in the end I felt we were communicating on entirely different wavelengths. Then I met Tess Stimson, wife No 3.
Her 25th birthday celebration in 1991 was in full swing at a London restaurant when she stepped towards me, saying: ‘May I have a birthday kiss?’
I was intent on placing a polite peck on the cheek. But, instead, Tess planted a massive smacker on the lips, which bowled me over in an instant.
I met Tess Stimson, wife No 3. Her 25th birthday was in full swing when she stepped towards me, saying: ‘May I have a birthday kiss?’ She planted a smacker on the lips, which bowled me over in an instant. Pictured: Tess Stimson and Brent on their wedding day
In less than a week, impetuously, we started to plan a future together, even though I was still with Debby, albeit with the marriage on its last legs.
However, once Mrs Sadler the second got wind of my new romance, she went on the warpath, accosting us in the lobby of the London hotel where Tess and I were lying low. It was an unfaithful man’s worst nightmare.
‘You’re never going to leave me,’ Debby roared, her face flushed with anger. Then she told Tess: ‘You’ll never have him. He’s mine. If he leaves me, he’ll have nothing.’
Next, she began to brand me a ‘love rat’ in the newspapers. Tess hit back by dismissing her as ‘an irrelevance, just one more bill on our list,’ a quote she spent hours thinking about to make it sound as spiteful as possible.
A magazine cover story about Tess and me, with the headline Foreign Affairs — The Woman Who Scooped Brent Sadler, provoked another round of verbal hostilities from Debby.
She labelled Tess as having a ‘bad reputation for stealing husbands’ — which was untrue — and ‘a laugh like a hyena’, which stung my third wife-to-be.
Obviously, they detested each other. With hindsight, it would have been better for all of us if I’d tried to dampen down the fire. But I did the opposite: feeling the need to strike back, I encouraged Tess to do her worst.
That was a mistake which stoked further resentment and acrimony, and I soon regretted.
It wasn’t helped by unsolicited paparazzi shots of Tess and me walking hand in hand, looking as if we were without a care in the world.
When Ioan and Bianca recently stepped out together for a show of unity in Los Angeles, my own memories came flooding back.
I fully understand why they did such a thing. Ioan wanted to make a public statement of commitment to Bianca. But against the background of his torrid marital breakdown, such displays only risk fanning the flames of acrimony into a dangerous inferno.
If I hoped for a fresh start by marrying Tess in 1993 (a wedding covered by Hello! magazine), it didn’t happen, even as two more children came along, Henry and Matthew, now
