When Peter FitzSimons spoke to Mia Freedman earlier this year on Mamamia’s No Filter podcast, he was impressively candid about the transformative effect his sobriety had on his health and mental wellbeing.
Now Lisa Wilkinson has revealed her husband’s decision to stop drinking in December 2014 also overhauled their 24-year marriage.
Speaking to the Australian Women’s Weekly, the Today host said after years of coming home to find FitzSimons sleeping off long lunches, of conflicts and steely silences, both he and their relationship are healthy.
“I feel like I have my husband back,” she said.
But two years on, things are different. To start with, FitzSimons has shed 40kg by quitting alcohol and sugar, weight he’s been trying to shift for a long time.
“Every year I’d say, ‘Good on you, darling – this year you’re going to do it’, hoping he’d do it for himself and for his relationship with everybody else,” Wilkinson told the Women’s Weekly, “but this time he has.”
And both believe their marriage is better off as a result. While neither professes to have the perfect union (if that’s even a thing), FitzSimons earlier told Mamamia that he and Wilkinson have “a bloody good relationship”.
“We don’t have 365 blissful days a year. I say we have 50 blissful days a year, 300 pretty good days and 15 shockers,” he said.
“But as we have got older, no joke, 15 shockers are now down to three shockers.”
Three out of 365? We’ll take those odds.