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If there’s one word to describeDanielle Staub, it would be “survivor.”
TheReal Housewives of New Jerseystar has battled everything from table flips and tabloid headlines to ended engagements and even a debilitating health battle with arthritis over her 56 years of life — and has still managed to come out on top.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise that she feels confident she’ll survive her divorce from estranged husband Marty Caffrey, who filed in August just four months after their lavish wedding ceremony held on the Bahamas’ North Bimini Island at the Luna Beach Club.
“Fiercely I will push through this and like a warrior,” Staub tells PEOPLE exclusively, over lunch at New York City eateryTessa. “I will overcome everything like I always do. I will always land on my feet. And I’m not changing who I am. I might end up alone for the rest of my life, but I’ll be happy.”
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“It’s hard enough to go through your problems, but keeping it private would have been nice for me knowing that I do have deep buried trust issues,” Staub says. “Once you do what he did publicly and then refused apologize for it? It’s hard to come back from that.”
Prior to their public problems, the two had been bickering over a variety of things in their relationship, Staub says. Tense dynamics with their blended family (Caffrey has three adult children from a previous relationship) even came into play.
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Eventually, it got to the point where Staub knew there was no turning back.
“I own my part in it,” she admits. “I know I’m not perfect — I’m not hiding from anything that I’ve done. It takes two people for any relationship. He and I both did our damage. But I own everything I do in the moment, when I do it. … If I hurt somebody, I’m going to say ‘I’m sorry’ immediately. … And he was never sincere.”
“I think he just likes the attention of people fighting over him — for him, with him,” she states. “People think that I love to fight and I don’t know how to live like that. I really don’t. I’m very good at my job. But when I go home, I don’t want people say, ‘What are we working now?’ I don’t want people giving me rules. I’m 56 years old. If I want to pick up my phone, I want to pick up my phone. I don’t want anybody thinking that I can be controlled. I wanted somebody who fell in love with me and doesn’t’ want to change me after that. There’s nothing wrong with that. You’re supposed to fall in love with who I am.”
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Still, despite their problems, Staub says she’s can’t pinpoint exactly went wrong in their marriage.
“I’m extremely disappointed and I really wish that things between he and I would have gotten better,” Staub says. “I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out and pinpoint what the exact reason is. And I can’t tell you. … I don’t know if he and I know what it is. I just think that we both wanted it to be great and it’s just not great.”
“It’s not me. I tried to fix it,” she continues. “I kept thinking this would fix it, that would fix it … but it never did. And all I was doing was just robbing myself of the truth. If it’s this broken, it’s going to stay that way. You can’t fix it. … I literally had to say to him, ‘We can’t talk past this. I’m out of energy. I’m not fighting with you, I’m not fighting for you. I just want to be done.’ I don’t really have anything else in me.”
Caffrey, in a statement to PEOPLE, said, “This is not my world nor do I have any further interest in it. These are manufactured celebrities in manufactured lives who manufacture their own truths. I look forward to getting back to my reality among real people. My loving family and vast amount of friends.”
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Meanwhile, Staub is not looking back, except to ask Caffrey to move on too.
“Just let me go,” she says. “Stop trying to hurt me. What else was it for? If everyone in my life goes as gracelessly as they came in, I’d be so grateful. But people have a tendency with me to come in real fast and leave like they’re going to take me down with everything that I might have shared with them. You don’t do that.”
“I wanted to grow old with him. I wanted us to be happy,” she shares. “I wanted a man to stick up for me and say, ‘That’s my wife and I love her.’ He couldn’t do that, so I’m doing it. … I will never throw the first punch, but I will finish the fight.”
And as for that engagement ring? Well, she’s keeping that.
“He’s not getting the ring back,” she laughs. “Nobody can say they want something back they gave to me I didn’t ask for.”
The Real Housewives of New Jerseypremieres Wednesday, Nov. 7at 9 p.m. ET on Bravo
source: people.com
