Open Mic With Cameron Daddo And Alison Brahe

After 28 tumultuous years, one of our favourite couples debriefs on the challenges they’ve faced and the love that’s (mostly) held them together.

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Alison Almost 28 years and counting. I have been married now for well over half my life. True, compared to my parents-in-law, who just clicked over 57 years, it’s still early days. Yet with divorce rates on an incline, the longevity of our marriage is something I am really proud of.

Have our 28 years been the cliché, ‘happily married’? What even is ‘happily married’? For many, it’s the idea that fights are non-existent, sex is plentiful and you want to be together every minute. If this is your marriage, congratu-bloody-lations! May at the end of your lives you fall asleep in each other’s arms, take your last breath and be buried together. For the rest of us, or at least for me and Cam, there are times when we argue, we don’t like each other for a day and to save our sanity, we need time apart. I’m totally cool with all of it.

Okay, so I don’t love the fighting part, though we are fair fighters – we never name call or say something so hurtful you just can’t ‘unhear’ it. At the resolution of our fights we almost always realise we could have nipped it in the bud much earlier, and use the experience to not make the same mistakes the next time. This took many years of attempting and failing, finger-pointing and tears, and yet we can still tie ourselves up in knots over the tiniest things.

When we first met at the age of 20 and 25 our connection was, to use the Fire Danger Rating scale, catastrophic. I literally melted into Cam – a love so intense he walked on water in my eyes. That’s how I tend to fall in love with people and things. The only trouble with catastrophic love? It’s a long way to fall if it all goes wrong; the heartbreak feels like death.

Our marriage has been through many deaths, but most importantly, many rebirths. That’s why we’re still together.