EXCLUSIVE: Despite a rocky week, Sam never expected Chris to write ‘leave’ during Sunday’s MAFS Commitment Ceremony, as Sam broke down in tears.
“I just want to go” Chris whispered back at their seats. Sam chose to ‘stay’ but admitted he regrets what he said next to his husband Chris, in an unaired moment later that night.
“I remember, I turned to him and said something like, “It’s going to be OK, you’re going to get to go home, you have a few days to reset, we’ll try next week,” he told nine.com.au.
This was knowing Homestays was coming up. But in that moment, Sam regrets not standing up for himself.
“I should have just been like, ‘Yes, Chris, see what I’ve been dealing with, you need to sort it out… You’ve just been told off for an hour by the experts’.”
Instead of staying strong, “the empathy in me went to comforting Chris” Sam admitted.
“It validated him as the victim and that wasn’t productive for him, and it wasn’t productive for me.”
Chris’ decision to ‘leave’ blindsided his husband as Sam broke down in tears. But it wasn’t because of “heartbreak” per se, it was an accumulation of every emotion over the past week.
“It was shock and it was … the feeling of ‘Why the hell did I try so hard to fix this for you to just write leave? Why did I go through all that agonising pain of bringing it up at the Dinner Party?'” Sam shared.
“If I didn’t care about Chris, I wouldn’t have brought [last week’s Commitment Ceremony comments] up. I would have just coasted through and wrote ‘leave’.
“Or if I was there for the wrong reasons, I would have just ignored it and let him walk all over me. But I wanted a good relationship.”
Sam said despite their fight, writing ‘leave’ didn’t cross his mind.
“This is the first time we actually had something to really discuss with the experts,” he explained. “So I was staying 100 per cent.
“I don’t know what Chris’s thought process was. It just didn’t make any sense… Because to give up that quickly was just crazy to me.”
Speaking to nine.com.au, Chris said his decision to ‘leave’ didn’t come easy.
He said he was “feeling the pressure” of both the experiment and “having a child not far away”.
“I just thought, I want go home and focus on my fatherhood journey, and I did feel like Sam, airing our laundry out in front of the entire cast and all of Australia, it just became a bit too much for me,” Chris explained.
Chris said he “didn’t anticipate” Sam would be so upset by the decision.
“If I had time to gather my thoughts and process it all, I probably would have written, stay,” Chris admitted.