There can be no doubt watching your kids skip off and leave home after spending years devoted to keeping them alive and happy can have a huge impact on a person.
While some struggle with the massive void, actress Caroline Quentin has managed to find a silver lining in having more time on her hands after her own daughter and son left home: dating!
The Jonathan Creek star reveals in this week’s Second Act podcast how she and her husband Sam Farmer missed out on the dating stage of their relationship the first time around after Caroline fell pregnant two months after they got together on the set of Men Behaving Badly.
Now married for 20 years, Caroline and Sam, who is 12 years younger than her, are able to reignite the romance.
“Sam actually now has even said I'm quite glad actually that we've got time for ourselves. You go back to dating like in the beginning,” says Caroline, 65.
“We didn't get much of that because I was pregnant within two months of meeting Sam. I just fell pregnant. And that's how it happened. So we didn't have a lot of early dating life, and I was working, filming pregnant with Emily [an actress, now known as Rose Quentin].
“And then suddenly, now we have time to do that so we are going to go and have supper together somewhere and it'll be really nice.”
Empty nest
When it came to the realities of empty nesting however, Caroline says that Sam took the absence of their children much harder than she did.
During the chat Caroline talks about her "mother's guilt" at being away working on set for a lot of their childhood, while Sam was the stay-at-home dad.
“I cope much better than Sam, who was with the children all the time in their early life. I have to say he has not coped so well,” Caroline admits. “He really has struggled with it because I'd be away filming and he'd be there getting them up, getting to school, getting to the dentist. Emily left quite early at 18, then William when he left to go to university, Sam was not in a good place with it.
Keeping a long-term marriage alive is no mean feat. Having watched her own parents split when she was a teenager, Caroline knows it takes hard work - and that a happy ever after is never a given.
“We have been married for 20 years but been together for nearly 30 years. Like all marriages we have had our moments. My parents divorced after 28 years together when I was 14, it’s hard. The adults in the world try and do their best. As parents nine times out of 10 I make the wrong choice and have to face up to that likewise in marriages.
“We have both had moments where we have really had to apply ourselves to it and you can feel things slipping. I don't know, so far so good is what I'd say.
“There's no predictor of a future because we've managed to have a pretty solid time thus far, there's nothing certain next week when it won't grind to a halt or end or run out of road or whatever. We are entitled to make our own decisions as adults. We do our best. And if it doesn't last forever, so be it.”
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