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Kristen Doute and Luke Broderick looked back on their heated fight on Wednesday’s The Valley after the episode aired, admitting that they weren’t at their best in that moment.
As Nia Booko, 36, and Danny Booko, 42, who recently welcomed their fourth child, addressed their castmates’ tension, Kristen, 43, opened up about her frustration with Luke, 34, and his lack of understanding for what she was going through after welcoming their daughter Kaia last June, as he admitted to being regretful about their handling of the situation.
“Especially now with time passing, it was like in hindsight, I’m like, of course, he’s never done this either, and it must feel helpless in a way. He doesn’t share my pain, which is, like, lucky for him, but also, he can’t empathize with that. He wants to be able to help but doesn’t really know how to all the time. And I don’t want to delegate responsibility because I feel like I’m making 50,000 decisions every minute,” Kristen explained on the April 22 episode of The Valley: After Show.
That said, Kristen noted that at the time of filming, she felt like Luke just didn’t “f*cking get it.”
“I think what’s hard for me is that I try to communicate to him, like in the grand scheme of our lives, our marriage eventually, Kaia’s whole life, this is such a small, temporary moment,” she continued.
According to Kristen, she hopes that in the future, if she and Luke are able to get pregnant again, the two of them will have a better understanding of how to navigate the tough moments of postpartum.
“I don’t care how many books you read, all the friends tell you all the stuff, like when you’re going through it yourself, it, no one can explain it to you,” she noted. “I still have this connection with Kaia, and no fault to Luke that he absolutely does not have or understand, and can’t, he didn’t carry her. She doesn’t even know until a certain age that she and I are not the same person. He can’t fix [it]. He can’t man up and repair. He can’t make me not feel in pain.”
Although Luke did his best to help Kristen walk through the hard moments that followed her pregnancy, Kristen admittedly didn’t know what she needed, which she felt was “really difficult” for her fiancé.
“I remember especially in the first, like, maybe three or four months of him just being like, ‘If you just tell me what to do,’ which sounds so sweet and loving, but I’m like, ‘I don’t know, and I don’t want to have to tell you,’ and so, I think that that was a lot of our fights where I’m like, my tone and my snap judgment wasn’t always what he needed,” she admitted. “It wasn’t great for him. But I’m like, ‘It’s your f*cking house too, and you know where the laundry is,’ where’s he’s just like, ‘I just want to know if you need help.’ But I’m like, ‘What I need is for you to just do and be and not ask, because I literally can’t.’”
In his own segment, Luke said that a lot of things went through his head after their fight.
“I have a lot of feelings about the fact that Kaia is going to see that one day … I don’t like her seeing that side of Kristen or me. I’ll just sum it up with I don’t feel great about it,” he stated.
Luke then said that while Kaia was an easy baby, the hardest thing for him was navigating his issues with Kristen, who wasn’t ready to start being intimate as soon as he was.
“The hardest thing for me … [was] between Kristen and I, like our relationship, and I didn’t anticipate that,” he shared. “We are so blessed to have Kaia, but it doesn’t, that fact doesn’t seem to be helping us get on the same page. We’re still struggling with it, but we’re working on it.”
“When we can’t take the pause to see the good in each other, it all just goes bad. But we’re working on it,” he added.
Also on The Valley: After Show, Nia told Kristen that she still feels like Danny doesn’t understand her amid her postpartum journey at times.
“That’s so normal … They try, but you’ll just never have the experience that we’ve experienced,” she noted as Danny told Luke that the first year of having your first child was one of the “toughest seasons in your life.”
“The biggest thing is, truly, the sleep deprivation. There are things that Nia has said to me that I never thought she would say in her entire life. There’s things that I’ve said to her that I never in my entire life thought I would say to her. Your fuse can be very short at times. [But] at the end of the day, you still have to try to be better,” he explained.
“Both parties have to be receptive. There can’t be walls up. They gotta come down,” he added.
The Valley season three airs Wednesdays at 8/7c on Bravo.
