Bruce Willis' wife Emma Heming mistook marriage struggles for heartbreaking truth

Bruce Willis' wife Emma Heming Willis opened up about noticing subtle shifts in her marriage before the actor husband’s frontotemporal dementia (FTD) diagnosis in November 2022.

In a recent cover story of People, Emma revealed that she and Bruce had an easy relationship but not long before his health scare, she started to see some different moves in Bruce behaviour, like stuttering.

"FTD doesn’t scream, it whispers," she told the outlet. "It’s very gray to know where Bruce stopped and where his disease kicked in. I started noticing his stutter started to come back, but I never in a million years thought that was a symptom of FTD. Conversations weren't really aligning anymore, and our relationship started to shift. It was hard to put my finger on why and what was happening."

She did not realize there was an underlying medical cause instead, she started to doubt herself, "I thought it was something I was doing in our marriage that was not working anymore,” she admitted.

Emma went on to say, "It’s like you're banging your head against a brick wall. You're just like, 'Where is the miscommunication coming? What is happening within our relationship?'"

"I have heard so many other couples that have gone through this where they just can't figure it out (and) think it's a marital problem, but in fact, it's a symptom of a disease," Emma noted

Following the official diagnosis of Bruce's dementia, it gave Emma relief, and all the built-up resentment vanished in thin air.

"There was relief in understanding, 'Oh, okay, this wasn't my husband, it was that this disease was taking parts of his brain'. Once you hear that, I just softened."