Ulrika Jonsson never realised how lonely she was during her third marriage.
The 52-year-old former weather girl divorced advertising executive Brian Monet this summer after 11 years of a "sexless marriage" and Ulrika signed up to Channel 4 dating programme ‘First Dates Hotel’ in a bid to find love again.
In the ‘Stand Up 2 Cancer’ special that aired on Thursday (10.10.19), Ulrika was paired up 48-year-old Paul and speaking on the show she shared details of how lonely she got during the union.
She said: "We made a great team for parenting, but I definitely think we were lost in the children and dogs and obligations.
"When I finally opened up to one friend about my marriage breaking down, she said to me, ‘Oh Ulrika, you must have been so lonely.’ It had never occurred to me that I was lonely because I was never alone. I’m never alone, there’s children, dogs, you know. But being lonely is a different thing."
The mother-of-four and Paul, who is from Bristol, hit it off and the final catch up on the twosome revealed that "after hitting it off in Italy, Ulrika and Paul returned home where the laughs keep coming".
The former ‘Shooting Stars’ panellist previously admitted she feared she wouldn’t have sex for the rest of her life when the "intimacy" in her marriage stopped and considered asking her spouse if he would let her have an affair so she could have the sex she craved.
Ulrika – who has 11-year-old son Malcom with Brian – said: "I thought about asking my husband for an affair … I had that mad thought in absolute desperation, when you think, you approach it kindly and gently, next time you cry, next to you scream. You are trying everything. I thought, I want to stay in this marriage, if he doesn’t want to, I don’t want to die without having intimacy ever again. That is kind of how I felt."
The Swedish blonde – who is also mother to Cameron, 25, from her first marriage to John Turnbull, Bo, 19, from her relationship with Marcus Kempen and Martha, 15, whom she has with second spouse Lance Gerrard-Wright – admitted she "couldn’t bear" the thought of being rejected which is why she only "instigated" sex a "few times" because Brian was always uninterested.
She added: "I have to be honest. I only instigated a few times because I couldn’t bare the rejection. When you hope that something might happen and it could just be that those signals weren’t picked up on. Maybe I wasn’t crazy, raunchy enough or whatever it is, but for me It genuinely wasn’t about sex it was about intimacy."
Ulrika Jonsson did realise she was so lonely during her marriage
