“I’m not happy,” Amor Vittone says simply. “I don’t trust Joost [van der Westhuizen] any more. I need to find myself again. My heart needs to be happy again.”
So Joost has moved out, provisionally for a month or two. He’s staying with a friend and has taken only clothes. Their children, Jordan (6) and Kylie (4), are with Amor, safe in the house on Dainfern golf estate. Joost fetches them and takes them to school as usual. Sometimes he spends afternoons or evenings there.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen in future,” Amor says. “I’m living in a haze. I can’t see tomorrow yet.”
“I used to think: you find your prince, you get married, you have kids. And yes, you work at it. But I was in fairyland. I never thought something like this would hit us.”
Amor stood firmly by her husband on Valentine’s Day last year when a newspaper revealed the existence of a hidden-camera video showing Joost cavorting with a woman and taking drugs.
“Our marriage was under pressure but he tried so hard to save it. And I gave it my best. But every time you get close to one another, even just for a kiss, you visualise that other stuff. You try to say it’s just the devil; you try to focus. That was the hardest thing for me. It helped when I could sometimes believe it wasn’t him in spite of the doubt.”
The night Joost told her “he thought” it was him in the video she could see he was a broken man.
“I’d sort of expected it but when it happened it first had to sink in.” There was so much heartbreak. And she also felt sorry for him.
Joost’s confession still didn’t mean the end of the marriage. “I still had hope. Joost too. He was afraid of losing us. We told each other we were going to work on this and we did.”
“Things happened in the past few weeks that stirred up the old distrust. The smallest thing can disturb that fragile trust. That’s what has now happened to us.
“I realised I first had to heal because I could no longer trust. And without trust you can’t move on. And then you are no longer alive.”
She told Joost she couldn’t go on like that. “He asked what we could do to make it work again. So I told him I had to find myself again. I have to be happy again; then I’ll be able to make the right decisions.”
Does she think her marriage can work again? “I wanted it to work. I wanted to grow old with the person I married. I thought that’s how life worked.”
Now she has to make a decision, possibly the most difficult one of her life. “It’s so sad because of course I still love him. And I know he loves me. He’s sorry. But something inside me says: can I still trust him?”
Read the full article in the YOU of 3 June 2010.
On the internet:
www.amorvittone.co.za