How many years can you spend with a difficult man?

Someone who's loyal to you but rude and belligerent to pretty much everyone else.

Someone who praises you and criticises you in turn. Calls you hot, calls you fat, celebrates your talents, pokes away at your insecurities?

Someone who talks about women in a way that makes your skin crawl, but in your hardest moments, is your biggest champion?

How many years can you swallow the feeling that this is not the way it's supposed to be?

That maybe you staying is somehow endorsing his behaviour? Enabling him? Lending him a respectable facade? Plenty of people say so.

How long can you stay in a relationship like that?

The answer, we learned this week, might just be 25 years.

Watch: Jackie O opens up about addiction. Post continues below.

Jackie 'O' Henderson is one of two Australian radio hosts who have dominated the media landscape for decades. The pair make the kind of money that even back in the golden age of radio deals, made eyes water.

Jackie is beautiful and funny, friendly and cheeky.

The yang to her yin is Kyle Sandilands. One of the most controversial figures in Australia, he is both catnip to a broad, diverse audience and a feminists' bogeyman nightmare.

If I was going to list all the things he's said that have made him the target of a years-long, female-led campaign to bring him down, this piece of writing would go on for a week.

A flavour? In their 'driving the kids to school' timeslot of 6-9am, a Melbourne listener wrote to the Australian Communication & Media Authority to complain that:

"I was sitting in my car at 6am at the time this breakfast show started… In the first ten minutes they mentioned (and these were the exact words) 'sucking c**k' 'licking vagina' and 'eating each other out'."

Yup. Sounds about right. Sandilands regularly refers to women as "It" and "That" and "Thing". He's been suspended and censored and fined many times. None of it has ever mattered. In Sydney, at least, he and Jackie have been the untouchable King and Queen of 'brekkie' radio and their contracts and fees are front-page news.

Even those who hate what they do have to admit that they are great at it. They famously negotiate as a block, and their most recent contract, signed in 2023, is a 10-year deal worth $200 million.

Considering that Jackie O's announcement this week that she would no longer work with Sandilands was apparently sparked by an on-air row about astrology, it's not unreasonable to assume that she had reached a place where her mental state could no longer be bought. A place where the camel's back couldn't handle another gaslit straw. A place where she was, finally, finally, sick of this sh**

Listen to us discuss this further on Mamamia Out Loud. Post continues below.

At 51, with the kind of financial security that 99.9 per cent of the population can only fantasise about, she did what women all over the world dream of: she told the offensive alpha-male to stick it.

There are many who will never forgive her for being the person who sat beside Kyle Sandilands for two decades, providing him with an air of respectability that, they would argue, he did not deserve.

And there are those who have never recognised her incredibly hard work or her talent. A read of her 2024 memoir The Whole Truth reveals an exceptionally competitive, canny media professional, someone determined to make every show great, who turned up early and researched and picked up all the slack.

In that book she also she writes about years of unhappiness, recovery from an addiction to painkillers and about finding, in the last few years, a new way to live.

You can go through something like that and get to a place where the same old bulls*** deals you have made with your various devils no longer work, no matter how much security they come with.

You can reach a place where suddenly, you just can't.

Only Jackie Henderson knows if that's where she's at. If this is a stunt, if this is a cry for help, if this is a virtuous way to get out of a contract that had become a millstone. All those things are being speculated.

But for some women who reach their Act Two, the ones who have given decades of their life to men who never deserved them, there's a quiet recognition there.

Take the money and run, babe, they're saying. Twenty-five years is plenty.

Feature image: KIIS1065.