Property Ladder star Sarah Beeny says marriage is 'hanging by fingernails' after cancer struggle
26 October 2023, 07:32
Property Ladder star Sarah Beeny has said her marriage is "hanging on by its fingernails" after living with cancer.
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Beeny, 51. who was given the all-clear from breast cancer six months ago after being diagnosed in August 2022, said her husband Graham Swift had found her hard to live with.
She admitted that the couple had only stayed together for the sake of their four children.
"We’re hanging on in there by our fingernails. I mean, it’s not easy, is it?," Beeny said.
"Graham always said, ‘the day we have to work at our marriage, I’m going to leave’.
"And I was like, ‘really?’ But I think he has had to work at it to be honest."
She added: "I was being particularly horrible, because I have been a bit horrible in the last couple of years to be honest at times.”
Beeny said that her husband told her that neither of them would want to live apart from their teenage children.
Speaking on Gabby Logan's podcast The Midpoint, Beeny said her husband told her: "'You know the thing is Sarah, you’re not prepared to leave and have your children half the time, and neither am I, so we’re going to stay together.
"And we’re going to stay together happily or unhappily, so which would you like it to be?’
“And I was like, 'oh that is quite dark, isn’t it?'
“He said ‘you want to be happy or unhappy, because either way we’re still going to live together’, so I was like, ‘OK we’ll do happy then, shall we?’. He was like, ‘what a good idea, maybe you should be a bit nicer?’
"I was like, ‘yeah alright I will.’ So logical, isn’t it?”
As well as Property Ladder, Beeny is best known for fronting Channel 4 series Sarah Beeny's Little House Big Plans and Sarah Beeny's New Life In The Country, as well as founding collapsed online estate agent Tepilo.
She told the Telegraph in 2022 that she had “a little bit of a breakdown” when doctors revealed the initial cancer diagnosis.
She added: “I thought, ‘You don’t understand. I have waited 40 years to hear those words.’ I knew I was going to hear it one day."
Describing how the loss of her mother taught her “resilience” aged ten, the property expert revealed she was too young to understand the magnitude of her mother’s illness at the time.
“I knew she’d had a mastectomy but I didn’t know what a mastectomy was. I didn’t know what cancer was. I didn’t know until the day she died,” she explained.
Explaining how her mother died at home following a lengthy battle with the disease – which subsequently spread from her breast to her brain, the presenter recalled overhearing the doctor explaining her mother “wouldn’t wake up”.
But Beeny said her fear of the disease was greater than the battle itself.
“That final frontier of fear in my life is sort of done,” she admitted.
“They just said, ‘You will be honest?’ and I said, ‘I promise you that I’m going to be around for a jolly long time yet.
“It’s going to be a bit difficult. But I promise I won’t lie.’ And I think they were OK once I said that.”
Admitting the “fear makes you pack a lot in”, Beeny recalled how her own diagnosis “opened a tinderbox of stuff that I’ve carefully swept under the carpet for a really long time”.
