The Real Housewives of New York City alumna looked back on the early days of her romance to ex-husband Jason Hoppy in the latest episode of her podcast that dropped Friday, April 12, admitting she ignored the warning signs before waking down the aisle.

Those warning signs included Hoppy’s past romance with a reality star before dating Frankel, and the fact that he was always “super charming” — something she noted “we perceive as positive” but in time, “becomes nauseating” and “insufferable” and “ends up being a toxic trait.”

“You have to really, really listen to the red flags,” the SkinnyGirl founder advised listeners in the second installment of her iHeart Radio podcast, Just B Divorced with Bethenny Frankel, that dropped on Friday, April 12. “If you know something’s not right, you get the f— out. … And if you don’t know that it’s right, it’s wrong. … That’s just a point blank fact.”

That’s not what Frankel did when she married Hoppy in a lavish televised wedding in 2010. The two, who share 13-year-old daughter Bryn Hoppy, wound up splitting in 2012. They spent the next 10 years locked in a nightmare divorce battle.

So what went wrong? Well from the get, according to Frankel, it seems she wasn’t exactly interested in Hoppy to begin with.

“There wasn’t really an attraction for me. It was more of, like, something in my mind…where I convince myself or I tell myself or I use logic to say to myself that I should be into this,” she recalled, sharing that at the time, she was living alone in her small apartment without much money and felt the pressure of adhering to society’s unspoken timeline. “I let the universe tell me that I was in my late thirties and that you’re supposed to be having kids by then, or you’re supposed to know what road you’re on. I didn’t really have family, so I had no safety net, no security with money and no idea. And I just wanted to be wanted.”

The two met in 2008 at a bar called Tenjune in New York City’s meatpacking district. They got together later, when Frankel called him after another guy she was seeing – whom she described as “A-list” – upset her during a night out.

“I was feeling a little bit low and then I called my ex, and that’s when we got together. So it was sort of a low, vulnerable point,” Frankel said. I wasn’t really that into him, I convinced myself to be that into him. … It would be like a security blanket.”

Frankel confessed “there were moments” of their relationship “being good,” but “they were very fleeting.”

Her first red flag came when she learned that the night they met, he allegedly “pretended” he didn’t have his car downtown and instead rode uptown with Frankel. “Then he asked the driver to take him back downtown to get his car so then he could go home,” Frankel said. “So it could either be endearing that he wanted to hang out with me, or a lie and that he wanted to really hang out with me because his friend knew who I was.

Red flag No. 2 came when, within the first couple of months of dating, Hoppy allegedly said he really wanted to have kids and that Frankel “would have to think about getting pregnant within a reasonable period of time” because of her age. “Now I did not think of this as a red flag. I don’t know why I didn’t. I think other people would think of it, but… I led with my heart and not my logic and my mind and my gut and my stomach.”

Soon thereafter, Frankel got pregnant with Bryn. “”And I’m not blaming anyone else — my body, my own choice,” Frankel said. “[But] once I got pregnant, I was on the road. And once you’re doing a television show, you feel responsible. … I was not happy in my relationship. I kept going because I was doing a television show and I was very stupid.”

The third red flag, Frankel said, was waved around the topic of money. Specifically, while discussing Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson’s divorce, Hoppy apparently said “that Nick should taken everything from Jessica.”

Frankel had made more money than Hoppy at the time, she said, but “didn’t want there to be a disparity.” She claims she would carry the weight of big expenses, like the bulk of the monthly payments towards their apartment, while he would cover what remains.

“Why would I think that was okay?” she asked, in retrospect, of their financial setup. “I wasn’t even that in love with this person to begin with! I was kind of convincing myself.”

A “s—ty” prenup was signed before the two eventually walked down the aisle, though Frankel even fought that idea at first until her agent at the time and lawyers pushed her to do it. “I said, ‘I’m marrying a regular guy, a small town guy. He does not want my money,’ ” Frankel remembered. “Famous last words.”

 

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The topic became a sticking point in their decade-long divorce.

“I was so naive,” said Frankel, admitting that she felt “uncomfortable” talking about money with Hoppy. “I was a late bloomer. I hadn’t made a goddamn dollar, and I was in my late thirties. …. And I was so trusting.”

On her podcast, Frankel said she hopes other women don’t make the same mistake, urging them to get the best prenup they can.

“[Marriage] is not a romantic act — being in a relationship and being in a commitment is a romantic act,” said Frankel. “Signing a contract and being in a contract with another human being? … That is a business deal. So you can hear it or not, but you’re a dummy if you’re not hearing it because I went through torture to tell you this.”