'Real Housewives' Ends with Family and Tears

After five months, the “supersized” second half of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” reunion aired Sunday with some “shocking” revelations and more petty, tit for tat arguing that probably could have fit neatly into the usual 60-minute timeslot.

Bravo host Andy Cohen starts the segment by attempting to turn a very heated evening to lighter topics, namely the sex lives of the women. After a montage of clips from the show, he asks Kathy Wakile how she keeps husband Richie hot for her, Teresa Giudice whether she has sex more than her brother and sister-in-law Melissa Gorga, and even tries to get Caroline Manzo to divulge how her sex life is going after becoming an (almost) empty nester.

“That’s my very personal business,” Manzo replies.

Giudice jumps in, saying she’s seen Caroline and Albert be very sexy with one another. Even when she is trying to defend her old friend, it is awkward, as Manzo clearly wants nothing to do with Giudice.

Giudice and Gorga live in Montville Township, and the show sometimes films at their homes in town.

The “shocking” revelation of the night is that Manzo and her sister and former cast mate Dina Manzo are no longer speaking. This was previewed after last week’s episode and all week long discussed heavily on Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, so it was not exactly a bombshell. Still, its delivery was dramatic.

“I lost a lot of my relationship with [Dina],” Manzo says. “She was led to believe a lot of things that weren’t true.”

“By who?” Cohen asks.

With a smile, Manzo says, “Do you really want to know?”

She goes on to say, “She has a good friend that likes to talk and when she says things to her that aren’t true against me…I’m looking at you [Teresa].”

Giudice claims that she has nothing to do with it. Manzo says she is willing to produce emails as proof, but disappointingly never actually does so.

Even though Jacqueline Laurita is not present at the reunion due to a t that happened the night before, Cohen insists on talking about her fallings out with her daughter Ashley Holmes over the course of the season. It is mostly Manzo speaking about her niece and sister-in-law, although Wakile did have an interesting insight.

“We felt bad over the course of the season because there would be a scene with Jacqueline and Ashley and then cut to us [Kathy and daughter Victoria] having a Cleaver moment,” she says, adding that she cannot compare the situations.

This brief reprieve prefaces another hour and fifteen minutes of three-against-Teresa. Even though it is clear that Wakile and Gorga do not want to hurt their family member, they cannot seem to stand her (admittedly erratic) behavior.

“Teresa, stop it, you’re turning evil,” Gorga says at one point, and despite her angry words, she legitimately sounds like she is worried about her sister-in-law.

When Giudice claims that she is being attacked by her three costars (a claim that is not unfounded), Gorga says, “You’re not being attacked; I hate when you say that,” again sounding truly heartbroken over the situation.

Manzo, on the other hand, has no sympathy or love left for Giudice. She even calls her selfish for wanting her brother and sister-in-law to stay at her house on Christmas Eve.

“I talk about you all the time; I don’t like you,”  Manzo admits at one point.

Wow.

Giudice does little to help herself, however. When Cohen asks her if she regrets anything she said about Gorga over the course of the season, she takes it as another opportunity to talk about what Gorga said about her. When pressed further, she has Gorga read to her from a list of insults she said in order to pick one she was sorry for.

Even Cohen clearly loses patience with Giudice, even going as far as to criticize her famously poor English. He brings up her husband’s still frequent use a gay slur, despite Teresa apologizing to Cohen for its presence in Season 1 during the first reunion. This time, Giudice defends her husband’s use of the word, saying he and her brother call each other that all of the time. Surprisingly, Manzo also defends Joe Giudice, saying he is a “character” and it is his ignorance and not malice that causes him to use it. Cohen seems unconvinced.

In the end, Cohen wraps up the season of family feuds by asking each of the women what family means. The quotes ranged from profound to passive aggressive, but they are worth repeating:

“I think that family is the heart of who you are,” Wakile says. “You may not like each other at times but you try to solve things. Family is love, even though it doesn’t always seem that way.”

“Family is very important to me,” Giudice says. “I mean, I don’t have a big family. I have my parents, my brother, his wife, Kathy, her sister and her brothers and her parents. Friends come and go but family is forever.”

“For me family is about loyalty. And it’s about respect,” Gorga says. “We all do love each other deep down inside and never want to see each other hurt, but we just need to learn respect.”

“I think family is a group of people that are bound not by choice but by blood,” Manzo says.” Sometimes you have to swallow your pride and forgive even though you don’t want to but because you know it’s the best thing for them in the place that they’re in in that moment. [It’s saying] ‘Sometimes I don’t like you but I love you with my heart.’”

Manzo then randomly goes back to the conflict with Dina, which is clearly weighing heavily on her mind.

“I remember the day Dina was born, you know, I decorated her cradle; I used to put her to sleep at night,” she says. “We’re going to be fine one day, we have to go through it. And if she has to hate me for awhile, hate me. I’ll never hate back, know that about me. And I’m sorry to my parents for this very moment, but when things go bad. It could be the worst time in the world, and any one of us could, ‘I need you,' and they’ll be the ones that’s there. It’s your family. Not your friends; it’s your family.”

When Cohen asks if she is also crying about the end of her friendship with Giudice, Manzo says no. She says she is sorry for the end of Giudice’s friendship with Laurita, because “that was a friendship.”

Of Giudice, who she has often called “family,” she says “We didn’t have a friendship; we had an acquaintanceship.”

And with that, the third season of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” ends once and for all. With all five housewives returning for the fourth season (filming now), we can be sure that this is not the last we will hear of all of this. And, according to her blog, even Dina will make an appearance.

Until then, "Housewives" fans can fill their addictions with “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” Mondays at 9, “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” premiering Nov. 9, or Dina’s show “,” airing Saturdays at 10 on HGTV.