Maia Dunphy: ‘We tried living together. It didn’t work’

"I think the more people question our relationship, the more they're wondering if their own relationship is okay," says Maia Dunphy, about her unconventional living arrangement with her husband Johnny Vegas.

Vegas lives in London with his teenage son while the broadcaster and writer is settled in Dublin with the couple’s two-year-old son Tom.

“We tried living together. It didn’t work,” she jokes, on the latest episode of the Róisín Meets podcast.

“A lot of friends of mine started having separate rooms during those first few months with a baby and never went back and that really works for them, but other people are just horrified and I think that says more about them,” she says.

What’s making you happy? Seaweed, sleeping babies and soup

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‘Dads feel guilt too. I don’t know if it's the eviscerating guilt mothers feel’

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‘Women struggle everywhere. There’s this feeling that you are an inferior being’

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Dunphy plans to take Tom out of school for a year when he is seven and travel the world with him. “It’s a TV pitch at the moment so I’m going to see if they will pay for it,” she tells Róisín Ingle.

The idea is inspired by her own experience of moving to Paris with her parents as a child.

“It was the 80s and most people in Ireland didn’t go anywhere, but I moved to Paris. At seven I was very open to it and I was old enough to understand and learn the language,” she says.

Listen to the podcast to hear Dunphy speak about her new book, The M Word: For Women who Happen to be Parents, working with Podge and Rodge, scooping up orangutan poo and peeling bananas in Borneo in her 20s, and more.

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