Two weeks into dating, we were sitting in my dining room. He had his arms around me, and he said, “There’s something I need to tell you.” I was like, “Okay.” He said, “I used to have a gambling problem”. He said, “I went to GA for two years, and now I’m cured.” I’m very, very good with money. I was a bit I’m not sure about this. I said, “What sort of gambling?” He said, “Fruit machines.”… I’d never even heard of gambling addiction. I’ve never gambled in my life apart from the occasional lottery ticket. I don’t understand scratch cards. I don’t understand fruit machines. I know nothing about gambling at this point.

He was about eight years old on holiday with his parents and got given him and his brother, they got given a big bag of two pennies each. They went and played all the machines in the arcades like kids do. The big bag of coins was to last them the week, and [partner] got through all of his in one go and he wanted more straight away. He thought, “Oh, no, I need to do that again.” It all stemmed from there. As a teenager, his pocket money would go in fruit machines in fish and chip shops and stuff like that.

There’s one game on our phones that we used to play. It didn’t cost you any money. It was never going to cost any money, but it was quite fun to play. We both had it, and he was on his phone all the time doing this because he’s got to feed this addiction, this addictive personality. I took it off his phone. I took it off mine as well. As I said, transparency, everything has got to be a two-way street. He said, “You don’t have to stop playing it.” I said, “I’m not going to ask you to do something I’m not willing to do myself.”

You have to read everything the internet has got to offer and just keep reading them. You need to learn about the addict and the addiction itself because until you can understand it, I can’t help him or me without learning as much as possible. Especially considering up until February, I hadn’t heard of gambling addiction apart from his one mention when we got together. Oh, it’s a whirlwind, and you can’t take your eye off the ball.

I thought this is going to be really hard. This man is a 6-foot ex-rugby player and the man of my dreams. One of the things I love about him is his masculinity. I’m, “Okay, so I will take control of all of these things, but I don’t like the word control. I’m not doing this to you, I’m doing this for you. To keep your masculinity, we’re going to do it this way and nobody’s ever– This is just what I’ve come up with. This is what I want to tell the world that this transparency from the start has to be a two-way street.” He can pick up my phone and go through it anytime he likes. I control the money, but I do it so transparently. He knows everything we’ve got, where it is. He just can’t get to it. I said, “I will never be able to make it impossible for you to gamble. All I can do is make it really bloody difficult.”

You haven’t got long to make that decision. Do I stay or do I go? You’ve pretty much got to make it there and then. On the 22nd of February, good grief, my world’s just fallen apart. Do I stay or do I go? Got to make a decision quickly. Then you’ve got to learn everything that there is to learn about gambling and gambling addiction, and you’ve got no time to do that either.

You have to keep doing it. I can’t relax and think, “Oh, I won’t bother checking his phones at all this month.” At the beginning it was obsessive. It was like every day. Then I think around once or twice a week, once or twice a month, and you have to remind yourself, “I haven’t checked his phone for a few days or a couple of weeks,” and you have to make yourself do it.

All the gambling facilities in the high street, the posters, and the colours are so enticing. That shouldn’t be allowed. It’s like a pub landlord walking outside with a bottle of whiskey trying to tempt in younger lads, kids maybe, “Come in here. This is great. Alcohol is amazing.” It’s the colours and the bloody machines themselves. Honestly, these fruit machines, these slot machines, do you know they entice you in, and then they give you all the free tea, coffee, biscuits, crisps, and anything else you want.

We went to see our MP about Chris Philps and the white paper. [Partner] said to him, “I’ve seen you in a casino shaking hands and saying, “Job well done.” We told him that [partner’s] gambling and that what we want him to do is that we want him to write to Chris Philp and the government, which he did. When I said to him, “My husband can put up to £900 in a fruit machine in one go.” He went– because like me he thought a fruit machine has a few pound coins, not– He didn’t know you could feed notes into slot machines either. I didn’t know and he didn’t know.

Then in February last year, [partner] was always on his phone. He was quite secretive.

If he’s on his phone and I can’t see his screen, you get completely paranoid because he would trick me into going to sleep at night by saying he was really tired. Put the light off, I’ll fall asleep… As soon as I was asleep, and I did catch him a few times, he’s on the side of the bed on his phone, you could see the light. If you get really sneaky and moved gently, he’ll still hear you, and then he’ll flip his phone shut.

I’ve gone through his banks all the way up to June and it was between £300 and £900 a time that he was gambling. He’d go and get £300 out of the ATM and then an hour or two later he was doing it again. I thought I’m missing something. It never occurred to me that somebody could put £900 into a fruit machine in one sitting.

And then all the free bets on these adverts? There are people that can’t listen to the radio on the school run because of the gambling adverts, the bingo adverts. They shouldn’t be allowed to advertise outside of the watershed…These windows on the shopfronts should be blacked out. There should be no enticements on the outside.

I used to listen to Planet Rock Radio Station and I stopped listening to it because I’ve realised there were gambling adverts all times of day. You turn on the TV, if you see advertisements, there’s gambling advertisements, they’re everywhere. You walk down the high street, there’s gambling shops everywhere. I didn’t see or hear any of these up until February. Then I have my eyes opened and suddenly it’s everywhere. It’s like, when you buy a new car and you don’t normally see that kind of car, and then you buy that car and suddenly you see them everywhere.

I said to [partner] and to everybody I get the chance to, the only way to walk out of a casino as a millionaire is to have walked in as a billionaire. You will never ever, ever get money from gambling. You only ever borrow it. You give it straight back. You might win a £500 jackpot that probably cost you £1,000 to put in. You will never, ever make money. You will only ever lose it. They don’t give you money. You don’t win money. They just lend it to you. You’re going to give it straight back to them, and they know it.

We then went in Ladbrokes, “We’ve come in to self-exclude.” This is just a few doors along. These places are everywhere. Somebody would walk up the high street and realise they are everywhere. We went to Ladbrokes, and they went, “Oh, here’s a leaflet. Contact them.” I can guarantee you he could go in Ladbrokes right now and won’t get turned away. You can’t get excluded from all Ladbrokes. Only that one. You have to go through the whole thing again to get– Self-exclusion doesn’t mean squat. There’s no such thing.

[Partner] said to me, “I want to go in and self-exclude. Will you come with me because I’m not strong enough to do it myself.” We went into two gambling shops. The first one, oh, these machines are so colourful. It’s like you say Vegas. It’s disgusting, and then the free food. The GambleAware poster was half behind a fruit machine at the very end of the shop in a dark corner, half in. That’s it. That’s it. There’s signs everywhere. “Free refreshments. Free snacks.”

The lure to get you in, and then they lure to keep you in, and they lure to get you to go back in. Do you know you can reserve a fruit machine? Yes. You could go in and load it full of hundreds of pounds so you know it’s going to pay out, but you’ve got to go, they will reserve that machine for you, so you go back in the next day and you’re straight back on it. How disgusting is that?

These bloody machines give out a £25 voucher, but you can’t use it that day, you have to use it next day because it expires at the end of the following day. These free bets, free spins. You might not have gone back the next day, but then you got this voucher and you might win that £500 jackpot, but of course, you use your £25 voucher, and you put in another £3, £4, £5, £6, £900. These enticements should be illegal. They’re disgusting.

The only way to walk out of a casino as a millionaire is to have walked in as a billionaire. You will never ever, ever get money from gambling. You only ever borrow it. You give it straight back. You might win a £500 jackpot that probably cost you £1,000 to put in. You will never, ever make money. You will only ever lose it. They don’t give you money. You don’t win money. They just lend it to you. You’re going to give it straight back to them, and they know it.

Stigma wise, until the 23rd of February, I felt like [partner] was the only person in the world with a gambling problem. Then I got over that pretty quickly at that [GA] meeting.

I was very, very ashamed and I apologized to him for saying what I said two weeks into our relationship. I said, “I shouldn’t have said that to you. I didn’t know any better. I’d never heard of gambling addiction. That’s the worst thing I could’ve said to you because I’ve closed the door on you ever being able to tell me anything,” because if you’d have said to me at any point, “I’ve got a problem with gambling,” I would’ve thrown him out. That was in his head because I put it there. I felt really guilty about that, and I’ll always feel guilty about that.

I went back, and I went back, and I went back, and I was on his phone for about three hours cross-referencing every single location of every single ATM transaction on his Barclays app. He’d been gambling his business money. He’d been putting credit cards into ATMs. I just found everything.

When we got married, we got married a year and a half ago, I paid for everything. I paid for what I wore, I paid for what he wore. There was 15 of us that went into a very expensive restaurant, I paid for all that. I thought he didn’t have any money. I had no idea he was gambling. I honestly thought he was having an affair.

It’s so multifaceted. It was the hurt of the lies. The hurt of all the money was painful, but I can deal with that. It’s not his fault, it’s an addiction. It’s the lies. They’re the hardest thing to recover from. Being that the man you love is capable of lying to you so frequently, so easily, so constant… I’m 5’3″, and I feel like this gambling monster is 10 feet tall and it wants my husband, and it’s not having him.

You have to get really strong really quick, and you feel like you’re in a Generation Game spinning all the plates, although I have to keep checking his phones because it doesn’t come naturally to do that. It’s a really horrible position to be in. I have to keep having to tell myself, “You’re not doing it to him, I’m doing it for him.” Everything I’ve asked of him is a two-way street, and you just have to keep going and putting one foot in front of the other, and it is hard. It’s hard, and you have to keep finding that strength even when you feel like you’ve got no strength too. You have to keep telling yourself why you’re doing this.

The only game that he’s got on his phone now is Sudoku, which I don’t mind, although he does play it a few times a day, he’s not obsessive over it. There’s only so much Sudoku you can take in a day. If I thought he was playing on it constantly, I’d take that off as well. We play Wordle every morning, but that’s it.

Checking [partner’s] phones and making sure that he’s not gambling on his phones, he has no control over the money whatsoever. I thought this is going to be really hard. This man is a 6-foot ex-rugby player and the man of my dreams. One of the things I love about him is his masculinity. I’m, “Okay, so I will take control of all of these things, but I don’t like the word control. I’m not doing this to you, I’m doing this for you. To keep your masculinity, we’re going to do it this way…I said, “I will never be able to make it impossible for you to gamble. All I can do is make it really bloody difficult.”

There’s so many things you have to think of and you have to keep these plates spinning to protect him because the protection measures that you put in place for a recovering gambling addict, they’re there for life. The meetings are there for life, the checks are there for life. The finance, the way the finances have to be, they have to be that way for life.

I went to his first GA meeting with him. Two guys stood outside afterwards for an hour in the freezing cold and pouring rain just telling me, “You’ve got protection measures in place, you’ve got to check his phones, you’ve got to control the money. You’ve got to deal with this stuff.” I was so overwhelmed.

I tried joining one of those Gam-Anon meetings one night. Oh my God, it was awful. It was awful. I stayed for half an hour. It was an online one. I stayed for half an hour and just disconnected and said never again. I found out more harmful than anything else… They was just a bunch of angry women. It was also a 12 steps meeting, so it was all about their failings. I just sat there looking absolutely baffled, but couldn’t believe some of the things I was hearing.

I read lots. I did phone GamCare once, I think, but I don’t know. The point I really need help is the point where I go really quiet, but that’s my personality rather than anyone else’s. The fault lies with me and no one else. Talking to [Friend] really and whinging at my nail technician once a fortnight. She’s lovely.

I want to cure everybody. If I could make gambling illegal, I would do it in an instant. I want to shout from the rooftops, “It doesn’t have to be this way.” For me, the stigma went when the anger kicked in.

All the gambling facilities in the high street, the posters, and the colours are so enticing. That shouldn’t be allowed. It’s like a pub landlord walking outside with a bottle of whiskey trying to tempt in younger lads, kids maybe, “Come in here. This is great. Alcohol is amazing.”

They need to get rid of the incentives and the free bets and the free spins and all these disgusting incentives and they need to stop advertising the crap out of it on shop windows and adverts on TVs. No free incentives and they need to increase the rate between the spins because that’s still too short. You can see they press the button, then, boom, £20, boom, £40, £60.

I’m very much involved with get gambling out of sports. Get it off of footballs shirts, get it out of stadiums. Get gambling out. You don’t need it. Cigarettes are out of football. Gambling is next, and I’m not quitting until it’s out.

We went to a clinic the other day for just nothing in particular, but she’s trying to discuss why we’re there, and I’m going, “Why haven’t you got any antigambling leaflets and gambling addiction leaflets in your search? Why aren’t there any posters up?” She was like, “Oh.”

Kids are aware of alcohol addiction and drug addiction. They should be aware of the dangers of gambling addiction. We need to flood teenagers with the dangers of this.