Paige Beechey and Jesse Maguire have been keeping a secret. The Block Island stars called off their wedding – set for December – in June. Now, in an exclusive chat with Woman’s Day, Paige reveals she was the one who suggested they press pause.
“I probably threw the idea out there first just because I handled the majority of the planning,” says Paige, 28. “I just could not bring myself to sit down and plan.”
“But it was the right decision,” 30-year-old Jesse adds.
And one they didn’t make lightly.
“Everything was booked, everything was bought,” says Paige. “But we’ve been feeling good about [the decision].”
Pressing pause
The couple packed up and left The Block in April, just after Easter.
“The year has been very hectic and we just didn’t have the mental capacity to give the wedding the attention it deserves,” says Paige, who struggled with mental health issues on the show and has been the target of vile online trolls, who she says have even threatened her life.
“For us, it’s not just about a wedding, it’s about actually getting married to each other. And we felt we couldn’t put our full focus into it with how the year’s gone so far,” Jesse tells Woman’s Day.
The Perth-based couple are still living together, though, and Jesse insists, “We actually came away from the show stronger than we entered, which people will probably be surprised at.”
“Our relationship was never in question,” agrees Paige. “But we can totally understand why people think that.”
The couple say watching back their often chaotic scenes on the show didn’t put a wedge between them either.
“We’re really great communicators, which is contrary to who you see on The Block. It’s such a bizarre situation that neither of us have been in before, so we have a lot of patience, a lot of empathy.”
“After each episode, we talked about how we felt. We understood we’re in this together,” says Jesse.
Paige said she went straight into therapy after finishing the show.
“We were doing it beforehand,” Jesse adds. “We made a decision for our marriage to do pre-marital counselling because it’s super beneficial.”
And while they say leaving the show early was “the right decision”, they don’t regret signing up in the first place.
“The biggest positive out of the show is the friends we’ve made – we’re so close to them all now,” says Jesse. In fact, Jesse tells Woman’s Day “the hardest part” of cancelling the wedding has been “having to tell our family and friends”.
“My mum was so excited to finally be able to call Paige her daughter-in-law. It’s all she wanted for so long. But everyone was so incredibly supportive and understood why we did it,” he says.
Stronger together
And while they won’t be husband and wife as soon as they’d originally hoped, the couple say they’ve never been stronger.
“If we got through the past six months, it’s a really great foundation for when life brings us bigger challenges to get through together,” says Paige.
They’re confident they will walk down the aisle eventually.
“We’re not going to leave it too long, but we want to have a little mental vacation from thinking about the wedding. We’ll start having the conversations next year,” says Paige.
