Only Natalie could have saved Barnaby

MOST of the time, when marriages split, the women are fine. It’s the men who fall apart. And that’s why Natalie Joyce’s fight for her marriage was so tenacious and selfless, writes Claire Harvey.

WITHOUT his wife and daughters, Barnaby Joyce is a man adrift.

Natalie Joyce knew he would be. That’s why she was prepared to put up with anything — even infidelity — to save him from his own stupidity.

And this is one of the great unspoken truths about relationships: all the time, women tolerate behaviour they know is wrong, or put up with disappointment, because they are terrified of what will happen to men if they’re allowed to kick away the scaffolding that keeps them upright.

Women who stay in tough marriages aren’t stupid. They aren’t doormats. To tolerate a man’s infidelity or cruelty is not an act of weakness. It’s an act of compassion. Of courage.

Because most of the time, when marriages split, the woman survives. The man disintegrates. Everyone knows a couple like this. A marriage breaks up and the woman loses ten kilograms, gets a sensational haircut and becomes a yoga instructor. The man ends up, literally or metaphorically, in the gutter, spilling kebab juice on the cool new jeans he wears these days. His new girlfriend eventually leaves him.

The tragedy in this case, if you believe Natalie’s version of events, is that while she fought and fought and fought to keep Barnaby, fully aware of his infidelity, he wasn’t able to appreciate what he was about to throw away.

You can feel the pain in her words, shared with the Australian Women’s Weekly. Natalie believes Vikki Campion “wanted my life from the get-go.”

From the outside, that characterisation seems weird. The idea of a woman “stealing” another woman’s husband seems so antiquated — and wasn’t it Barnaby who was breaking his marriage vows?

Barnaby Joyce with his wife Natalie at Parliament House in Canberra.

Well, if you’re as invested in a marriage, and in a man, as Natalie Joyce is, it’s not that simple at all. She didn’t just regard Barnaby as another individual who happened to live in her house, and who would have to be accountable for his own actions. To her, this was someone she needed to protect, even from himself.

“He was crumbling, and something in me still wanted to reach out and pick up the pieces of this broken man. It was gut-wrenching,” she said, describing the day Joyce stepped down as deputy prime minister, under enormous pressure.

Barnaby Joyce is one of the smartest and most thoughtful people ever to enter politics. And now he’s lost to public life, consigned effectively to irrelevance and an inevitable job with the Grains Council, because he pushed away the people who had actually made his career possible. Natalie. Their girls.

Once he’d walked away, everything evaporated: his reputation, his capacity for reason and, most painfully, his status as a straight-talking man of action — not just in politics, but in his pre-parliamentary business life as an accountant who specialised in telling hard truths to struggling farmers, and helping them get their lives and finances back on track.

Natalie knew that. Just like most women know that if their marriages end, the greater victims will be the men. It is why women forgive affairs and put up with poor behaviour. It’s why they ignore subtle slights and dismissive remarks. It’s why they stand by their men, even when their friends and family are urging them to leave.

Natalie Joyce’s torture isn’t just dealing with her new life as a single woman; a single mother. It’s the torment of watching her Barnaby fade from the bold, smart, clever, celebrated man he was, and should continue to be.

That’s why she hugged him so tight at his brother’s funeral this week.

She just wants him to be OK.

Claire Harvey is the deputy editor of the Sunday Telegraph.

@chmharvey