Strictly Come Dancing professional Karen Hauer, 38, spoke about all things divorce in a new interview on The Divorce Club podcast. During the conversation, she opened up about her experiences growing up and how her own parents’ divorce impacted her later relationships.
Speaking about her first marriage to her former dance partner Matthew Hauer, Karen revealed a bit about how her childhood experiences informed their split.
After tying the knot in her early 20s, the pair were married until 2009 before they divorced.
She told host Samantha Baines: “It was 2007 when it all just cracked open and I think it was mainly because I was never ready, we weren’t ready to face what was happening.”
Karen explained how they wanted different things from their lives and she needed some time to deal with her own childhood.
READ MORE: Kevin Clifton told ex Karen she ‘wasn’t very kind or nice’
She said: “It was me who instigated everything and ended the marriage but I also had a lot of things that I had to deal with, personally.
“So it wasn’t just because I fell out of love with him or I wanted to do other things, it was because I was carrying a lot of emotional things from when I was a kid and things I hadn’t dealt with.
“I think that all snowballed into this big… I felt like I was carrying around this tumour around my back that I hadn’t dealt with.”
Karen didn’t open up about what exactly she was going through at the time, but did reveal a bit more to Samantha about what her childhood was like.
Karen added: “It just felt like it was home, studio, home, studio, home, studio and it just became that.
“And there wasn’t that excitement for me anymore and for me, the way that I was brought up with my mum…
“My mum being a single mum and growing up seeing that structure with my parents… My parents divorced and it was very intense.
“They had a really intense relationship throughout their whole marriage and divorce, it was just messy.
“So I never really knew what a marriage was supposed to look like. I never saw it, I never experienced it.
“I just experienced seeing dishes flying around in the kitchen when we were in Venezuela, a lot of fights, it was a lot of fights and stuff.
“So for me not having that liberty and that extra excitement, it just became very structured. Same old.
“It left me thinking about what else I wanted to do.”
During her candid conversation, Karen also opened about her split from her second husband and fellow Strictly star Kevin Clifton, 38.
The pair were married in 2015 before announcing their separation in 2018.
You can listen to the full podcast here