Sunrise star Edwina Bartholomew reveals surprise living arrangements with husband

Edwina Bartholomew has shared more details about her unusual living arrangements, after revealing she and her husband had separate bedrooms.

Sunrise news presenter Edwina Bartholomew has opened up about a headline-making confession she made last year: She and her husband, journalist Neil Varcoe, sleep in separate beds.

As she joins Stellar magazine as a columnist this week, the popular reporter said that not only do they sleep in separate rooms, but they’ve “taken things to the next level” and live in separate homes altogether for most of the week.

“I have only spoken about it publicly once and the reaction was extraordinary. Hundreds of women slid into my DMs admitting they do the same. (Some men slid in, too – but that’s a conversation for another time),” she wrote in Stellar.

Edwina Bartholemew’s commitments on Sunrise keep her in the city most of the week.

Husband Neil Varcoe lives in country NSW, so the couple go back and forth.

“For some women, snoring sent them packing; others wanted a sanctuary filled with throw cushions, their partners did not. Now our family has taken things to the next level. My husband lives in the country with the dog and I live in the city with the kids. Each weekend, we traipse back and forth between the two or meet somewhere in the middle, Cameron Diaz-style.”

That’s right, like Bartholomew, the Hollywood actress does not share the same bedroom nor the same house as her husband, Good Charlotte rocker Benji Madden. And Diaz believes this unorthodox approach should be “normalised” for married couples.

Bartholomew is a new columinst in this week’s Stellar, with Buttrose on the cover.

The couple with their two children Molly and Thomas.

“To me, I would literally, I have my house, you have yours,” The Holiday actress said last December on the Lipstick on the Rim podcast.

“We have the family house in the middle. I will go and sleep in my room. You go sleep in your room. I’m fine. And we have the bedroom in the middle that we can convene in for our relations,” Diaz explained.

Bartholomew – who started sleeping separately from Varcoe about seven years ago – says this set-up could help relationships too, as it certainly makes her value the time they do spend together with their two children: Molly, 4, and Thomas, 2.

“It feels like a Love Actually airport reunion every time we come together with a slow-motion embrace and those newlywed feels,” she said. “Was it Shakespeare or maybe Hallmark that coined the phrase Absence makes the heart grow fonder? Regardless, they were onto something.”

The Sunrise star first opened up about her unconventional sleeping arrangements in a column with News Corp Australia in February 2023.

“When I would get up for work, he would struggle to get back to sleep, so we decided to trial separate rooms,” she wrote at the time.

“When we had kids, it continued. I would sleep overnight with the baby in my room and then he would wake up early to take over. Ten years into our relationship and five years into our marriage, it works a charm.”

Read the full interview with Edwina Bartholomew in this week’s Stellar, inside today’s Sunday Telegraph (NSW), Sunday Herald Sun (VIC), The Sunday Mail (QLD) and Sunday Mail (SA)