You're listening to a Mom and Me a podcast.
Mama Maya acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on. Hey, friends, it's Mia. I'm popping into your ears because if you love no Filter, you're going to love a show called Everyone Has An Ex because it's about stories. It's about relationships, and it's about what happens when they end and when things go
really really wrong. Today's episode that I'm going to share with you is called Double Trouble, and I don't want to spoil it, but it's about a guy called Josh and it's about a double life. Enjoy this episode, and if you want to hear more if Everyone has an Ex, we'll put a link in the show notes.
Young love, remember that reading someone your part time hospital job.
We get together every.
Night, they start making eyes at each other and one thing leads to another. Soon you're spending the night at their family home and having dinner with their parents. Well that's exactly how Emily met Josh.
We just had such an instant connection at the time, and he was quite assertive person where he was like, yep, I'm ready to meet your family. Literally within the first two months, we had met each other's families. His family were beautiful, My family were beautiful as well, so we both came from quite good people around us. And then our relationship just grew.
And when you meet someone so young, it really only goes one of two ways. You either grow up and apart or you grow together, like Emily and Josh did after seven years. They knew each other like the back of their own hands and trusted each other implicitly. At not even thirty years old, life was only just beginning.
And then everything came crumbling down one day when my sister knocked on my door and said, Emily, I think your partner has another girlfriend.
I'm Georgia Love and this is everyone has an ex Come with me as we dive into a collection of unconventional stories about relationships past through the eyes and the hearts of the very people who lived them.
Meet Emily.
She's twenty eight now, but our story begins back in twenty seventeen, when she was, in her words, just a baby, twenty year old.
Just come out of high school, started studying. I was going out a bit more, starting to socialize, meet new guys, and had had previous experiences in the past but not an actual long term relationship with someone. So I actually started working at a club back in the day and I developed a good connection with one of my colleagues, Josh. I then said, look, we're good friends right now. I went to Europe, did like a little girl's trip, came back and continued to grow with this person that I
worked with. We had a really good friendship and I think we had a lot of common interest. We both were interested in the same things. We just got along really well, started going out and we started to develop a relationship. And we were only kids when we met, so we were just learning about ourselves who were just starting our degrees, just starting to change jobs, starting to figure out whether we're going to stay at home or we're going to move out of home. So it was
a pretty healthy relationship. When I met him. He gave me all the things that I wanted. So he was this person not from my world. He was someone that kind of opened up other avenues where he was someone that I was, Oh, this person does something that I don't do, such as go surfing, lives on the beach. We just had things that I found really interesting about him. At the time, I was really intrigued by what he
was studying as well. We were both into health degree, so that's where we also had a connection with what we wanted to pursue in our careers, so finding someone aligned in my career in my life at that time. We both had good friends and family as well, so we were aligned in our values. But we were also very young school still kind of learning our values as well of what we want out of people. He was the same age as me, so we were both twenty.
I found him quite I would say handsome, but he was still young so still had those boy features where he had fair eyes, light blue eyes. He had brown hair, quite a fair complexion. He's European, so he, you know, was quite a handsome young man who I was attracted to at the time of work. But he had a really good personality. So the way he would talk to
me was very intelligent. From the start, he was a very good person to be around, so I found the way he would interact and articulate his words was also very attractive to me. He was someone kind of at my level with interactions, so as an overall, when I met him, I was like, Wow, he's smart, he's intelligent. He's tall, he's handsome, he knows how to talk to me. We can hold conversations for hours and hours, and that's what you look for, someone that you can just basically
become best friends with when you first meet them. Then we just started to progress and started seeing each other. We were pretty quick for our families to meet as well, so I think just because we just had such an instant connection at the time, and he was quite assertive person where he was like, yep, I'm ready to meet your family. Literally within the first two months we had
met each other's families. His family were beautiful, My family were beautiful as well, So we both came from quite good people around us, and then our relationship just grew.
I mean, it all sounds pretty great so far, and it was. They both lived at home, but they'd stayed at each other's places, go out for lots of dinners, and away for the weekends. It was all just so nice and normal. Emily couldn't believe her luck.
When when you're young, you're not used to this, You're like, oh wow, this guy is adoring you. He just takes you everywhere, like treats you how you should be treated in your relationship. So if you wanted to go for dinner here, books that here, we want to go our way for a weekend book this, we would go shopping. He would buy things for me, you know, just doing the little things. He was very loving and acts of service was what he brought to me at such a
young age as well. Over so I would say the first two years we just continued to grow with each other. He finished his degree, we started to think about maybe moving out in the next few years, so our relationship just grew that. We became a lot closer with my friends as well, so his friends. He started to lean away from just being that. He started to be involved a little bit more with my life, so my friends, he was around a lot more. My family, he started
to hang around a lot more. And when we looked in the next few years, we started to progress about moving out together. We decided to look at moving somewhere around my area, so he was from a different area. So my life started to become the bigger version in the relationship, which was not bad. He really loved being a part of my life at that time. So the progression was that we were going to look at moving out.
So that's what we did, so by the age of around twenty three twenty four, we started to look around, We're getting really excited or we'd also bought a car as well together, and then we did secure a rental at the end of around twenty twenty one, I think when around COVID kind of happened, So we actually moved out during that COVID period. So that was the next big step of our relationship. So there was always like goals of moving out and then in the next few
years probably getting engaged and then obviously getting married. In the meantime, I was still studying, he was working full time. I was also working, so we're still really working hard in our relationship, but we still had our main values, which was to move out and move in together, which we did. It was so exciting when you move out, like especially going to all the open homes in the beginning, and you're just so excited. You're like, wow, we're going
to take this next step. We were so in love, like we just could not wait to take this next step and be in each other's lives all the time and be able to come home from work and have someone there and talk about our days and be able to really live in our relationship one hundred percent. Because beforehand, you know, you go to your parents' house. It's still like a dating situation. It's a very different relationship to when you move out and you're able to plan the
future ahead. We were like excited the real test, like, oh, can we handle being around each other all the time.
So some quick maths, it's now twenty twenty one, Emily and Joshua twenty four and have been together almost four years.
It was the perfect time to take this next step.
The first six months is that honeymoon stage, right, So it's maybe similar to when people get married and they move out as well. You move out and you're like, oh my gosh, like this is amazing. You know, you're you know physically, emotionally, mentally, you're just so attracted to each other. You just can't wait to just see each other every day and be with each other after work, or just go out with your friends and just really
enjoy each other's company. You know, you're excited to cook together, you're excited to build the home together, like we were doing all this shopping and getting the place really ready for building a home. The only issue was that it was during COVID, so things started to get restrictive, as you know, so we weren't able to do as much outings as we wished we could. So when we actually moved out, we were kind of forced to stay inside all the time and be with just each other. So
it was a real test. Josh was able to leave and go to work because they worked in healthcare. For me, I was still studying and my job was from home, so I was home a lot of the time. But the satisfaction when he came home and being happy started to change. He started to not be as happy, started to be a little bit more tired, and the way he communicated and spoke to me started to change. And at the time we looked at it as, oh, it's just because when he comes home, it's just me there
in that seat. He can't really go out and see his friends. We can't really go out and see our family. So that was a difficult period of our relationship. We were never a fiery couple. We were quite relaxed and we got along so well that there was not much to fight about, and especially at that time, the only issues was that we were come all the time together. There was not much space and there was nothing we could do, so there wasn't much fighting. It was just
more maybe get irritable with each other. And then COVID finished and we started to go out with friends a little bit more. We started to see our families again, but there was just something not right. He just still didn't seem happy. I started to notice these emotions where he wasn't very excited to be home with me anymore. He just seemed a bit mellow down, a little bit
of a concern to be around. And I actually approached him about his emotions and how he's been at home, and it was simple, just it's just work, like it's just so much, you know, it's stressful. It was always about his work or his life. It wasn't so much that there was anything between us. But something's just not right because he's not you know, when's your relationships not one hundred percent, you know, when there's just starting to
have doubts. And that's what started to come in, and we kind of started to just become a little bit distant. So I wasn't sure what was going on. I felt like everything was fine on my end, but he was very difficult to communicate that with. So there was one day we'd been out with friends and the next morning he explained to me that he's not sure he can commit to our relationship anymore. I sat there with him on the couch, go what do you mean, Like, what
are you talking about? And he's just started to explain that he's not sure if he made the right decision I guess by staying in this relationship, and he's not sure he can commit and he doesn't know what it is, and started to make all these excuses about why he maybe thinks that us being together isn't really a good idea. And I'm really not stupid, I'm not oblivious to signs.
And that's what I said to Mago. There's been nothing, like you haven't shown me that there have been issues apart from how you've been irritable and tired and stressed or whatever, but you haven't actually communicated to me that there was something wrong.
He wasn't actually breaking up with her, but he certainly threw a bomb, and that started a really hard and pretty toxic cycle through.
End of twenty twenty one till about January. We started to have fights, so we started to really become intolerable with each other because he just was really changing. And then when he said all that, two days later, he would pull me aside and say, I'm really sorry. I don't mean what I said. You know I love you so much, you know I didn't mean why. So he starts to kind of love bonb me with his emotions of being confused and not sure what's wrong. And it
just really confused my head. So when someone's telling you they can't commit and then someone tells you, actually, I take it all back, like I'm really sorry, and if you love that person, of course you're gonna sit there. I'm like, yes, no worries, that's fine, Like I know you're going through something. It's all good. I told him, I've said I want to fight for this because I really love you. I really and truly love you with my heart. And you know we've been together for that.
This time was like four or five years. Like there's a lot of work to do. When we're young, we can work through it. And a feeling of doubt and that's what we would talk about ago. He goes, I think I'm having doubts and I'm not sure why. We were always sitting there at night and trying to work out why why are you having these doubts anyway? And then I always put me in a position where I thought I'm doing something wrong. Am I not giving him enough love? Am I not challenging him enough? Am I not?
And then you start to put it on yourself and you just don't know what to do, start to feel really insecure in your relationship because your partner's starting to throw these words and terms that you've never heard before in the last few years, and all of a sudden, yeah, it just starts to confuse you. Really, the end of twenty twenty, once are going to twenty twenty two New Year's we had officially had a very big fight, and I said, I'm just I cannot be treated like this anymore.
I can't be with someone who doesn't know what they want. I can't be told I want you one day and I don't want you the next day. I started to take days off from living with him, so we thought maybe giving each other space would be good. So a few days away from the apartment, I would stay with my parents. Obviously, I had a very close relationship with
my parents. They knew everything, so it was very fine to go back home to mine and then he would also do the same, so I would come back to the apartment and he would spend a few days at his parents. And this went on maybe for about one or two months, until I just called it and said, I'm going to move back home. Throughout that period, he
still never gave me one hundred percent. We both kind of agreed maybe we should take a relationship back and I will move out, and maybe he needs to work on himself a little bit more and really prove to me that he wants to be with me. But the best thing for me right now is to move away from him, be a bit more independent. It got to a point where I didn't want to break up, but I knew mentally I cannot go through these emotions anymore.
It wasn't really a break up, more of a break because Emily wanted to be with Josh more than anything, and soon he realized that's what he wanted to.
It was just a rollercoaster those periods of two months, three months. When you like someone and your heart is still in love with that person, you go back, and that's what happened. What he was saying was, this is the biggest mistake of my life. I should not have told you to move out. I was just going through some emotions. I promise you, I'm just working on myself. Just a few months apart and will keep seeing each other. I'm doing this because I want to be the best
version for when we are together in the future. He who would say about how much he loved me, and how much he would say about how it's all about building himself for being a better partner later on in life. He consistently messaged me every single day, as much as I told him, maybe we should just lay off speaking for a little bit. That was near and possible because I would still get my phone calls, I would still get constant messages. It was almost like we never broke up. Really,
it was just a break from living together. I thought he might just be going through some emotional things. Could have just been a really hard year with everything going on. I put that aside and I said, all right, let's work on our relationship. I won't live with you. Let's keep moving forward. And we did, and we worked very hard for the next two years. So I lived at home, he continued to live about a home. I helped him find his next apartment. So we were very much still together,
just not living together. We went to weddings, we traveled, and then we went away in the middle of the year to South Australia did a two three week wine trip. We were really excited because we're like, yes, this is right, Like we love being with each other, we love traveling. So end of twenty twenty two, I said, look for financial reasons, I prefer to live at home. Since our relationships working so well, you know, it's really not that different. Now.
Everything's fine. Our friends know we're back together, our family know we're back together. We really are just working well. We're both loving each other again. It just kind of
excelled back to where we were. The fear of like, oh, he doesn't want to commit to me had kind of disappeared in that period because he started to just give me one hundred percent when I was with him, and I didn't need to see him every day because he was being a healthy partner and that he gave me the things that I wanted again and everything was fine.
We planned a trip for Europe in twenty twenty three and we traveled to Europe for six weeks, went with just us two and the only thing I would say about that trip was that before we went away, I was thinking, like would he propose? And before we left he kind of said to me when we were sitting at the airport, and I remember this, he said, just letting you know, I'm not proposing to you because I don't think I can afford it right now. And I was like, okay, right, and I go, I know that's
not what the troop's about. I said yes, because an engagement won't change anything. We've been together for years, like I know this person will do it. And I also said to my I'm not asking for it right now, like I understand, Like if you're able to show me that you love me and that you want to be with me and you're still promising me that future, then I'm going to agree day you don't need for proposing this trip, because you can maybe can do it the next one that we go on or the end of
the year or whatever. There was no I still had that certainty from him because he still showed me that we would still be potentially getting married even when we're away. We're like talking about places that could be nice to get married, and especially when we were in Amalfi and Italy, we were talking about like, oh gosh, how beautiful would be to do our wedding here, Like the intentions were
always still there. He started to plan like that we would get married overseas and maybe a lope overseas and have a real intimate wedding with like our closest friends and just really he still painted this picture about getting engaged. So we go on our trip. Everything was beautiful. It was that European trip. Were traveling everywhere, so in love. We're like, oh my gosh, like this is amazing. We can't wait to do this again. And then we come
back and something changes again. I don't know what it was. I could not figure it out, but he starts to become the most up and down person I've ever met. So leading up to Europe, everything was fine. We go away, we come back, and he just becomes a person of doubts and insecurities again.
It was an absolute rollercoaster. But Emily wanted to stick by him and help him. It had been almost seven years they've been together now, and she loved him, didn't she.
We get to around February, he starts to really change, and this is a side of him I've never seen before. So this is when I start questioning if I want to be with this person anymore? Am I really going to be waiting around for someone to make up their mind? And the way he would talk to me was irritable, angry, tired. He didn't treat me how I was treated in the first few years. We weren't going out as much anymore. He started to not make sense with how he spoke
to me. His actions just were different. He would not touch me anymore, he was less physical, emotionally, started to be disconnected, and I really noticed it around my friends as well. How he started to treat me, it was quite rude. How he talked about me started to change
as well. He just became a different person. I always gave him the benefit of doubt that maybe it's because of his work or because of something going on with his friends, but it just got to the point where there was one night where he started to tell me that he had anxiety, and I said, what anxiety. You've
never had anxiety around me before. What's going on? And he did have a really big anxiety attack one night and woke me up in the middle of the night and said he can't breathe and just something's not right. So I didn't really do anything about it. I just let him be. I let him treat me how he wanted to treat me. And I continued on until we get to April, and then everything came crumbling down one day when my sister rocked up to my door. She knocked to my door and said, Emily, I think Josh
has another girlfriend. They've been together for two years.
Meet Olivia in twenty twenty two. She was twenty six and just out of a long term relationship when she went to work one day in a job in healthcare and was on shift with a guy she hadn't met before, a guy named Josh.
We have the same job, but we didn't work in the same area. I had to go to his area to work that day, so I'd never met him before. Initially, at the start of the shift, I didn't think anything of it. You just go to work, you're in work mode, you just get talking. He came across as very confident, but during the shift he asked me a lot about myself. So the job was really intense and we were working
together one on one for twelve hours. That's obviously a lot of time to get to know somebody he came across, very charming, charismatic, wanted to know a lot about me, asked a lot of questions during the twelve hours. But it started off with just general chit chat, but quite quickly it got into quite serious questions. He wanted to know about my family, my past relationships, what I wanted in a relationship. He had a way of asking the
questions without it seeming like they were too intimate. He asked me a lot about my previous boyfriend and why we broke up, and I said, you know, we had a great relationship. He was a great person, but just wasn't the person for me. And I remember saying a few of the reasons why I broke up with him, and he then said to me, oh, they're very similar reasons to why I broke up with my ex girlfriend. So I'd say that's actually probably how we bonded the most. I would say.
He spoke a lot.
About his ex girlfriend and what they were missing in their relationship and what he wanted in his next relationship. I then went home that night and he'd added me on social media as you do, and slid into my DMS, and we just got chatting when I left the shift. I remember driving home and thought, oh, wow, I've met someone that will be in my life for a long time. You have that feeling where you know that you met them.
For a reason.
That's definitely how I felt. I don't know if I knew in what capacity. Because of work, it's obviously like a different environment. I didn't know if we would just be friends, or if we would go out on a date or anything like that. But I definitely had the feeling that I'd met someone that we had a lot in common with and that i'd want to see again. So when he messaged me on social media, I did feel happy. I thought, oh, he obviously thought it as well.
We obviously did have the cane. It wasn't just one sided. From that day when we messaged each other, that was it. You start talking to each other every day, and we did not speak to each other for a day from July twenty twenty two onwards. I think initially my thing was I felt very seen. He seemed to really understand my personality. He seemed to really connect with my personality. It seemed like I had met the boy version of me.
Almost When he was asking me questions, he would always say, oh, that's the same as me, or that's what I'm looking for, or oh wow, we seem like we really want the
same things in the future. Even that first shift, I remember him comparing me to his family and saying that I had a lot in common with his family, and he thinks that just things like that, you know, my sister does that, or you know, you have a lot in common with my sister, or he would say things like, oh my god, it's so weird, like you remind me a lot of my family. You would fit in really well with my family. Spend a lot of time together. We spoke every day, We started going out on dates.
He was definitely the type to want to impress, want to whine and dine, you take you out to different restaurants, try different wines, things like that. He always thought of himself as a romantic and he wanted to.
Convey that as well.
I would say it was pretty standard the way it happened. You just start spending more time together, and then a couple of months later, you know, you just have the conversation and we were boyfriend and girlfriend. So that was maybe three to four months after July. We had the conversation that we were together, and that was it. I remember thinking that the feeling that I have for Josh is very different to the feeling that I had for
my ex partner. I remember with my ex partner, I always felt very safe and secure, and with Josh, I always felt excitement. I thought that maybe this is what butterflies were. I didn't recognize the feeling. I didn't know if it was love. I think it was definitely something that I wanted to explore. Because I'd only just gotten out of a relationship a couple months earlier. I was still very much in the era where I was wanting to do things for myself. I was wanting to keep
my independence. So I would say that probably the first year I was a very slow progression, but it was fine. It was healthy because we worked in the same workplace. We worked in different areas, but I did know a lot of the people that he was friends with, and he knew a lot of the people that I was friends with. So we slowly started to just go out into different work things or I would meet his friends.
But a lot of his friends from work I already knew, so it wasn't necessarily getting introduced to his friends, it was more just meeting them in the capacity of Josh's girlfriend. He was European, one of his sisters lived over in Europe, and one of his sisters lived quite rurally, so it wasn't easy for us to organize to meet his family. Josh's mum lived between Europe and Australia, so there was only small windows where we would have the opportunity for
me to meet her. He would always say, like, my mum is really excited to meet you. My sisters and my mum have heard so much about you. They're going to love you. Your everything that they kind of envisioned me with. He then went to Europe in the middle of twenty twenty three. He told me that he had booked that trip prior to meeting me a year before with one of his best friends, so even though we were together now, he'd already booked this Europe trip prior to meeting me.
I didn't have to leave from work, so I wouldn't have been able to go on this Europe trip either, I would say. When he was in Europe, he was very intense with me. He used to message me every day, call me all the time, send me a lot of voice notes. It had never really been like this before. It was always quite it seems like quite a healthy relationship initially, and when he was in Europe, I thought maybe it was just because he was there and he was missing me and he was sad that he had
gone to Europe without me. But there was a lot of like intense conversations, a lot of conversations about the future, a lot of how much he loved me, a lot of how much he missed me. And then when he came back, So this is a year into our relationship, in July twenty twenty three, I would say that it started to become a lot more intense. He would start talking a lot more about the future. I suppose I
thought that was normal. We've been together for about a year at this point, so I thought that he had just kind of realized that I was the person that he wanted to be with at this point, I would say, throughout the relationship, though it was a lot of push and pull, it was never this linear good stage. It never felt like a healthy balance of a normal relationship to what I thought a normal relationship was. There was
always good times and bad times. There was always times where he was really attentive, and then times where he wasn't really attentive. So for the first year, the ups and downs that we had were definitely more time that we could spend with each other because we were both so busy. I would say that we would go through periods where we were able to see each other a lot, and then periods where we weren't able to see each
other a lot. There'd be periods where he was really busy and unable to see me, and then periods where he'd want to see me every single day. It was just like how you always kind of know, like is someone texting you all the time? Is someone calling you all the time? Or was he a little bit more distant, not wanting to talk as much, not able to talk, maybe not answering my phone own calls for a couple of hours, or things like that. When I first got into a relationship with him, I was pretty anxious.
I would say.
I started going to therapy for anxiety around the same time that we had gotten together, and I thought that the ups and downs were always me. So when I wasn't feeling secure in the relationship, I would always think, like, it's just because you're anxious, it's your fault. Anything that's going on would just be because of you. So I thought that potentially that everything was always normal in our relationship,
and my emotions were the ones that changed. I would always end up leaving the conversation feeling like I had done something wrong and my reaction was the problem, and I would always bring something up but leave the conversation apologizing. So the time where that kind of became really evident
was on my birthday. It was my birthday when we were overseas with my friend and we had an argument on the phone, and he made me feel really bad about it, and I left the conversation saying to my friend, oh, I expected too much on my birthday. He did his best. He called me up. You know, He's told me that I expected too much of him and I should have
just been happy with what I got from him. At that time, I think potentially having the space saying it out loud, and then also just having a friend to talk to made it quite obvious that that wasn't normal.
After a year together, Olivia decided this maybe wasn't the relationship for her. After all, it had been fun, but it wasn't too serious. So when she got home from her holiday, she decided to call it quits. She told him this wasn't what she wanted, but Josh wouldn't let go.
I was getting messages the next day saying that he didn't want to break up and that he will fix it, and he doesn't know how he's going to fix it yet, but he's going to start going to therapy and he's going to be better and he's going to learn a lot about it, and he would really like if I could stick by him. Everything kind of turned after that. It went to a completely different level of a relationship. I was completely love bombed. I was getting text messages
every single day. I was getting phone calls every day, big paragraphs, and emails and letters, and he would do things for me. So he would come to my door and he would drop off meals that he'd made for me for the whole week and bring me flowers and organize dinners. And it was just zero to one hundred. He came and spent Christmas with my family in Queensland. He booked his flights. They were obviously expensive over Christmas. I think he spent upwards of five hundred dollars to
fly there. He said that he was really excited. He spoke a lot about it. He was I to meet my family. He wanted to know if he could get them presents. He was doing all the things that you would expect of a loving partner at that time. I would say we had a perfect relationship where he was completely devoted to me. He was always infatuated with me.
He used to tell me how great I was, and he would send me pictures of things that he would, you know, see in a magazine or on Instagram and say, I want this for our house, or he would just randomly text me and say, oh, I think you're going to be such a great mother. I can't wait to
have children with you one day. Or it was just like I was the best person in the whole world, and it was It's very hard to not like feeling like that when someone is just like absolutely infatuated with everything that you could do, and I could do no wrong. And he started doing a lot of things that I was doing as well. So we were in the same job.
I had gone back to UNI to study something, and then all of a sudden he wanted to go back to UNI as well, and he would want to study something, or I remember deleting my Instagram because I wanted to have some time off social media. So he also deleted his Instagram. And he would always just think that every idea that I had was honestly like the best thing ever I could have never imagined. April twenty twenty four, when it all unraveled the way that it did, I
was between night shifts. It was probably five pm. I'd just woken up and I had a text from Josh and had said, can you give me a call? We need to talk. I was half asleep at this point, and I call him up and I'm like, what do you want? Like, I'm getting ready for work, half asleep, and he was like, so I really need to tell you something. When we first started seeing each other two years ago, there was a slight overlap with another girl, and I had said, what do you mean by a
slight overlap? Just be straight with me. We met in July. Let's say we didn't have the our friend boyfriend chat till November. From November, how long was the overlap? And he said until February twenty twenty three, And I said, okay, I'm done, and I just hung up the phone he had told me about another girl from our workplace that he had seen slightly before me. So when he said that, I thought that he was talking about this girl at work called Amy. And I just continued to get ready
for work. And he had texted me saying I'm coming over. Don't leave for work. I said, do not come over. I won't be here. I'm going to work, And in the meantime he came over. He pulled up at my house and messaged me saying I'm outside, let's talk. Just as I was about to go outside, I got a message from Emily and it said something like, hey, Olivia, my name is Emily. Just in case you didn't know, I have been in a relationship with Josh for seven years. And I just walked out calm it, and he was
yelling over the fence, this doesn't change anything. We've been doing so well. I still love you. You're the one that I want to be with. And I just held up the phone and I said, look, she's messaged me. This photo that she's just sent me is date stamped from January. That's not February twenty twenty three. And he was saying, no, she's crazy, she's crazy. Don't believe her. I was like, babe, it's time stamped, like you just stop lying to me, Stop lying to me, and just
admit to what you've done, because there's evidence here. I'm not going to believe you. Stop with the act. And he just kind of was silent and he wasn't saying anything. I said, let me make it easy for you, because you've got a small little brain. I'm going to ask you some simple questions. Have you slept with her this year? And he said yes. And then I made him come over and I said, look at me in the eye. And he came over and I said, I'll never forgive you,
never speak to me again. And then I just walked back inside and I went to work.
Okay, we're all caught up, one guy, two girls, same time, So let's go back to Emily and her sister and dig into what she found out.
So when my sister came over and saw me, she showed me a message and it was stating that Josh has another girlfriend from work for the last two years and everyone knows. And I go, what are you talking about? And I go to my sister, where did you get this from? And she goes, look, I'm not sure, but there's a photo of Josh with the other woman, and I go, this can't be real. At first, you go no way. I literally thought, there's no way. He's not capable of that. Where would he find the time to
have another girlfriend? That was the first thought through my head, like who has time like for one relationship, let alone another one. So I had a chat to the person that sent the photo to my sister, and that person began to explain everything to me and said, look, Emily, I'm really really sorry. Basically, everyone knows that Josh has been in a relationship with Olivia for the last two years.
These are the photos of them. I don't know what else to say to you, but yeah, he's got another partner. And when I heard those words, I actually didn't doubt it. I go, okay, you know what, I think this makes sense because I've been feeling like something was not right, and now I think I finally know. But of course I'm sick to my stomach because I'm just trying to register that my partner has another partner. What do I do? Do I confront him in person? Do I say something
over the phone. You don't really know how to handle it, And at that time, I just thought, look, I know when he's going to call me. It's four thirty in the afternoon. He's just going to wake up from being asleep because he has a night shift tonight. I'll have a conversation with him on the phone. So I had my sister there at the time, so it was good to have someone with me, and I was very straight to the point he called me. I said, Okay, who is Olivia? And he kind of gasped, what are you
talking about? I go, no, you tell me who Olivia is and then we can continue the conversation. And then he starts to say, I don't know where you're getting this from. What are you talking about? I'm on a highway right now. How dare you start talking to me like this, I'm on the way to work. I go, no, no, no, you need to tell me. Have you had another girlfriend for the last two years from work named Olivia? And then he proceeds to say, no, I haven't. I don't
know where you're getting this from. I go, have you hooked up with someone else while you've been a relationship with me for the last seven years? And then it goes quiet and He's like, Okay, i've kissed someone. You've kissed someone, and obviously my reaction starts to become reactive. So little by little he starts to say, look, I can't talk right now. I'm on the highway. Please let me pull over and we can talk about this in five ten minutes. So he hangs up the phone and
I go to my sister. Oh my gosh, I don't believe him, like I actually think he's got another partner. So I found out the girl's name and I said, look, in that interim period where he was pulling over, I messaged the other girl, Olivia, and I said, Hi, Olivia, my name's Emily, just letting you know I've been a relationship with Josh for the last seven years. I highly doubt you had any idea about this, but I'd really
like to talk to you. And he's some phone of us for the last few months, just in case you wanted to see if she doesn't believe me.
So Olivia called. She wanted to know what the hell was going on too.
Basically, that phone conversation was Olivia explaining to me that she'd been with my partner, Josh for the last two years. They'd met at work. They were planning to move out in the middle of the year. Basically every single aspect of his life was a lie to me. First, it was really angry, and my heart just sank just through me. I just felt like I'd been actually hit by a truck, because I just you would never think tomorrow that your partner's just been with someone for them, not just cheated
on you, but had another relationship with someone else. But I think my mind didn't register what was going on, so I wasn't even able to cry. I had no emotion. I was just really confused and I wasn't sure how to process it. And as soon as I'd found out, I just kind of felt like, this can't be real.
This isn't real. I'm in a dream and it's you know, it's a very typical line to say, but really you sit down and you just don't feel like it's real life, because five minutes ago, I was waiting for him to call me before he goes to work, and now I'm finding out that he's had another girlfriend and he's setting up a life with someone else. When I feel like understanding in that moment, there was no like the emotional
side of it was completely cut. It was just this like numbness and I don't know what to do and what do I do next?
Olivia felt the same.
Initially, I didn't have, yeah, the feelings of sadness. I just had the feelings of warning to understand it, because it's your mind can't comprehend something that is so unfathomable, like surely this only happens in movies. So I spoke to her on the way to work and we started kind of surface level, getting to the bottom of a few things, and then we said, you know, let's meet up for coffee the next day after I'd had a sleep, and we went through pretty much the last two years of our lives.
We both just gave each other all the truth that we needed to hear. I found out there was also another woman as well, so he did wasn't just with one partner for the last two years. I actually found out that the reason why we've broken up in the end of twenty twenty one was because he cheated on me with another woman from work named Amy, who he had been on and off scene between the end of twenty twenty one. Between twenty twenty two, there was quite
an overlap of three girls in that year. A few weeks before, Josh comes over to my house and says, I'm so sick of my mates, so, you know, they just he kind of painted this picture that he's had a really big falling out with his friends and the wedding we were planning to go to this wedding in a few weeks that was going to be our first wedding of his friends. He told me, oh, I don't want to go anymore because I'm just so sick of my mates. They just can't make their minds up about something.
I feel like they're just not the right people around me. He always kind of explained to me that his friends were never really good people, just never showed up. They didn't have very good values. So he painted that to me at the time, and he made me believe that he had it falling out with the groom of the wedding that was coming up in the next two weeks.
So he had a shift that day of the wedding, and leading up to that, I was like, Hey, you sure like you're not going to go to the wedding because he has no like I don't care about this guy. I just you know, I don't want to go to the wedding. We're not talking at the moment, so in my head I thought he was going to work that day.
And the thing is, he actually was at mine the night before and we packed his lunch and his uniform was all laid out for work the next day, and he set the alarm for four point thirty five in the morning and got up, got ready, literally said goodbye, Emily, I'm going to work, and I'm my gosh, like, you know, it sucks you're going to work today, you know, have a great day. He's like, yeah, like, you know, it doesn't matter. You know, I don't really want to go
to this wedding. The man literally left my house in uniform only to probably get change in the cart and drive home and get ready to go to the wedding with Olivia. And that was not the first time he'd left mine and put his uniform on and pretended to go to work. That was a massive theme that we figured out when we'd met up with each other, and that's why I learned that he'd made fake rosters and
sent them to me. Throughout the last few years of our relationships, I'd never actually seen a real roster of their work until I'd met Olivia.
Obviously, because we worked together, he couldn't lie to me as much about his day to day life, so I think I was probably lied to less. I knew more about his day to day life. I knew more about his work, I knew more about his friends. And I had said to you, like, what did you think he was doing on his birthday? Christmas, New Year?
All those times? I thought he was.
At Valentine's Day? Just little things, but it was easy to use big dates for us to because obviously there was a lot over the last two years, but it was easier to use big dates. So for Christmas, that was the first time you met my family. Actually he went to Queensland for my family. So he had told Emily that he was at work, and I said to her, how much do you think he works? Like can you send me what roster you think he has? And Emily sent me a roster. I was like, no, that's not
our roster. And obviously, if you're not in a certain profession that does shift work, you're not going to know our roster pattern. You're not going to know.
And you trust and you believe your partner, right when they're telling you they're going to work, you think they're going to work. He told me over Christmas, when he obviously was with Olivia, because I'm in health as well. Work with the public holiday because I'll be working the public holidays, work on New Years because I'll be working New Year's. And I did work because I actually went to work thinking my partner was at work. Because they would message me and call me and pretend to me like,
I've just taken five minutes. How you're going, how's your day? You know, it wasn't like I didn't believe him. And I would get photos sent to me as well, so there were pre made photos as well of him at work, so that I would believe that he's at work. And I've now found out all those times that it was just a complete lie.
His birthday was in April, so that was only literally a couple of weeks before everything happens. He had told Emily that he was working on the day and we had like a big brewery Barkraur with a bunch of his friends from work, and obviously I went to that and he told Emily that he was working. But then I said, oh, like, what did you do for his birthday from you. Emily had taken Josh out on a picnic the next day and bought him like this, like
beautiful food and wine and things like that. And I went over there a couple of days later and I said, why do you have all this like gourmet food in your fridge? And he'd said, oh, it's all from eld you know, I just I just got it all, like, you know, I'd like to snack on it. And Emily's like that was from a gourmet.
Groser for his birthday, mind you, because I had to take him out for his birthday the day after because I thought he was working on his birthday. So when we went to Europe, when i'd met up with Oliviage, I asked her, so, what did you believe when he was in Europe for six weeks last year that he was with a friend, And she goes, yeah, you thought he was with one of his mates that he was traveling with overseas. What we'd figured out was that he lied to me about who he was on the phone to.
So he would tell me that, oh, my mom's calling me or my sister's calling me. I'll be five minutes, I'll be ten minutes. I remember this morning distinctly when Leamatha Coast and he goes for a well, He's like, I'm just going to go for a morning walk. It was early six in the morning, really early, and I'm like, oh gosh, that's very early to get up when we're on holiday. And it had been like two hours, and I go, where are you? Like I was messaging him,
and he's like, oh, so sorry. I got really caught up on the phone with my mum. I promised I'll be here soon. But it was all lies, all these times that he was maybe left for like an hour or half an hour, or he'd go to the bathroom and pretend to be in the bathroom and gone for half Now he'd be calling Olivia and expressing his love for her.
We also realized that he was real gifting, so obviously Emily's parents used to buy him a lot of groceries, buy him a lot of staff, pay for a lot of stuff. It was pretty much like the Tinder swindler situation, where you were paying for him and then he was
paying for me. So he would come and say, you know, I bought this beautiful bottle of wine, or I made you this food, but it was always we realized it was always from Emily's parents' house, and he would say, you know, I've bought this beautiful bottle of wine for us, but it was really something that like he'd made Emily pay for. One of the worst things I think was when we were going through what his house looked like, I said, what about his phone background? What about our
pictures next to our bed? You know, what about all my stuff that I left there? What about my bikinis that I left in the shower. And he would go around the house and put all of our stuff in these plastic bags and then take the other person stuff into the garage. When obviously the other girlfriend was over, he would switch the photos next to his bed. He would change his wallpaper on his phone, like obviously the contact changes as well, the contact changes on the phone, just to make sure.
When we were going through what.
Each other had left at his house, I said to Emily, what color was your toothbrush? And she said mine was the pink right, And I said, oh, no, so we had we were using the same toothbrush.
Yep, yep. That is the most like disgusting.
But there was more.
He was vegetarian with Olivia and with me, complete meat eater. He ate everything with me. This guy ate everything. When I met Olivia and she explained to me that, oh, he ate vegetarian with me. What do you mean he ate vegetarian with you? This guy would if we went to a restaurant, it was, oh, let's get the steak, babe, Well let's get the chicken, or let's I go. This
guy is not vegetarian. This guy changed every part of himself to please the other person in the relationship, so to please Olivia, for example, and didn't eat meat, which was just news to me that I think that is the most probably insane part of this whole person. This person is actually living and leading a double life, and I had no idea.
So when he met me in July twenty twenty two, as I said, he was quite attentive. Initially, he spent a lot of time with me. He had a lot of time for me. We would go out on dates.
And it turns out you were in the hospital having surgery during that time, and then you were in rehab for a number of weeks, So that's obviously how he had so much time initially, and then the other time, how I said, we were really good after breaking up September twenty twenty three to December twenty twenty three, we were together a lot, like how I said, it was a very perfect relationship during that time, and you were
doing real placement in Victoria. Yeah, so obviously he had a lot of time for me then, And it made sense why there were so many ups and downs, because we kind of figured out that if one of us was having a really good time, the other person was not having a good time, because it's impossible to give someone one hundred percent of yourself, so he would just be giving more to somebody else and less to the other,
and then it would kind of switch. And when you had these feelings of you know, he's not giving enough to me, or he's being different in high that it was completely accurate for us to be feeling that way.
I know what you're thinking, though, dear listener, how in this day and age can someone really lead a double life, especially millennials.
Social media so, like Olivia said, she didn't use it, so she was not active on it. But for me, so when I first had used so Instagram or whatever we were using the first years of our relationship, I was quite public and I used to post a lot more As the last two years came across, he really became we should be more private about what you post, maybe stop posting so much. He'd actually kind of made me believe I should really be a private person. So
I stopped posting photos as often. I actually removed a lot of the people that followed me. I became really private in my life and in public, like we still were tagged in photos. There was still stuff on his Instagram, but he actually didn't upload for years, and that was just he said, I don't use it, I don't post, I don't need to do it.
I didn't use social media. So that was another way that he got.
Away with it. When you would delete yours, he would tell me I'm going to delete mine for a bit because I think I need a break because I feel like I use it too much. I'm like, whatever, that's what you want to do, that's fine. I didn't actually think he'd deleted it because his other partner doesn't use it.
And I think initially your first thought is, am I stupid? Am I an idiot? Did I miss out on all of the signs? But when you think about how convoluted. This was to keep up this parade for two years. People like this are obviously very good at what they do, and I don't think he was obviously very good at lying. He always had a good answer, there was always a backstory to everything. He never slipped up, he never got us confused. There was never any any moments where he
made a mistake. So obviously, speaking to you, I thought, oh, well, Emily doesn't sound stupid, so I'm not stupid. But I just think you got to remember that this isn't normal, normal behavior. That these people can lie and they're rid of empathy or guilt, and that means that you don't
have the normal responses when you are lying. If I'm sitting here lying, I feel bad about it, so I have like an emotional or physical reaction, and you would think, oh, maybe she's lying because I'd be giving away signs or as he never had that because he didn't feel the emotions that we feel.
I probably don't need to point out that both girls broke up with Josh immediately, but for Emily at least this had been her partner of seven years. She couldn't hear all of this from a girl she'd never even heard of before without trying to get some answers from the man she'd loved.
My last conversations with him, it was hours long. We were on the phone, and I just wanted him to come cleaner by everything. So I basically just confronted him and said, Hey, what did you do on this weekend? What about when we went to South Australia? What did you do? What did you say? I said? He said it went with friends, So it was just continue lies and I just said my main thoughts. I was emotional on that phone call, and I remember being just like, how dare you? How dare you do this to me?
How could you have lied to me? I don't care if it was one years, two years, whatever it was to have done what you've done to your partner, the person that you meant to love. And I remember saying to him and like, you can't love two people at once, You can't be in love with two people. This is why you never gave me one hundred percent, and this
is why I had doubts. And I actually I really was quite firm with my wording with him, and I said, now every single thing makes sense because you have been in multiple relationships, and he still tried to deny the other girl Amy, but I said, what you've done you can't take back. I will never ever speak to you again. All I asked, I said, is that you never contact me. And I go, this will be the last time you ever hear my voice. I don't need to hear anything
else from you, and I hung up. I blocked him from every form of social media, every contact, and I think that was the pivotal point of moving on, is having zero contact with that person. My feelings of disgust were so overaught with my emotion at the time that I couldn't even be sad about it. I was just so disgusted and betrayed that I just I didn't want to hear a sorry from him anymore. His sorry was pathetic to me. His sorry was almost like he didn't
mean it. He's almost sounded like when I spoke to him that he was emotionless. He just felt like he'd been caught. And I just said, okay, well I'm done, and like I said, after everything was blocked, that was it. That was my last conversation with him.
Of course, it wasn't easy.
It was really hard and really really heartbreaking, but in being by herself and out of what was an incredibly toxic relationship, Emily's found a new version of herself, the real one that she actually likes so much more.
I no longer have the lease insecurities and doubts about a person. I feel like I'm more secure with myself because I was with someone who, like I told you earlier, when I felt like I was never good enough, like I wasn't questioning enough. I would give another example of where he'd put a lot of pressure on my degree, like you need to make sure you pass, like I'm
doing a medical degree. You need to make sure you pass your exams because we can't move on with our life unless you pass his exams in the next few months. Like I can't wait around for you, and you know you're not waiting around for me, Like this is this is my career, It's not just about you. And now I feel like, well, fuck you, I fucking passed my exams, and now I know when I'm going to finish and how much I'm going to excel my life without you.
He always painted this picture that he was supporting me so much this journey, and he'd done everything for me
to get to where I am now. I'm like, no, everything's for myself, and I didn't realize that until coming out of relationship, Like how hard I've worked, how much I've studied person I am today, I've just realized, like being my best version of myself, being on my own, I feel like I'm happier, Like I've learned so much from how I was treated, and staying with someone for the sake of saying with someone because you love them, it's just not It's not a real reason, and no
relationship should have these highs and lows, Like I've literally come out of that and being like I can do so much better. I'm going to get someone at my level and I deserve the world because what I went through is so not normal. It's not fair. But I
don't sit there and pity myself. I'm glad I've got it out of it, had that experience because I can only be a better version of myself and hopefully teach other people to look out for these things and not settle for less and put yourself first in your relationship, because that will be my next goal for my next relationship, that I am an equal to that person. That's why I feel like I'm my best version of myself now.
On top of that, they've both come out of this awful situation with something they really never expected.
I've also formed the most incredible relationship with Olivia. That is I think is the best thing to have ever come out of this.
Obviously there's been a lot of lessons that have come out from it, but I think go one of the days where I wouldn't have believed you. I think when you're young, particularly maybe high school, there's always this tall poppy syndrome situation happening with females. I think you're taught that the other female is the one to blame or the other female is crazy. The way that he tried to make it out on that night, but there wasn't
a second that I didn't believe her. And I just think we have just come so far as females that we are willing to be united and we're willing to be friends and some other female success doesn't mean that you're going to be less and I think that was definitely a way of the past, and I think we've just come so far, and we've just come out of this situation and we just want the best for each other.
I just want her to do so well, and we can talk openly about the situation, and we can talk openly about our goals and just say one of us is having a bad day, because healing obviously is not linear. I think we're doing so well, but obviously some days there's still repercusions from going through a situation like that where you might just not be feeling your best self.
But I know that I can message her, voice, note her, call her, and just have this platform where I'm not judged, and I always walk away from the conversation feeling so much better, and then we can just move on with our day, move on with our lives, and.
Yeah, it's great. Yeah, I agree.
It was really hard not to have a victim mentality. It was really hard not to sit there and think why did this happen to me? Why did I have to be the person that he chose?
Why? Me?
But there's good to come out of every single situation, So it's only going to be a waste if we don't learn those lessons. Obviously we have each other, but going into our next relationship will be so much better for it, and we'll have learned all the hard lessons, and I genuinely believe that we will stand there one day marrying the loves of our lives and we'll be so happy that everything happened the way that it did. I think it's just hard to see it at the time,
but now in hindsight, I wouldn't change it. I know that it was a terrible situation and I wouldn't wish it upon anyone. But I'm sitting here now, I've got this opportunity to do a podcast. I have you as my friend, and yeah, I think there's only good things to come from now on.
The one thing he did well was pick two girls that are very alike and very intelligent and very beautiful people inside and out. So you know, I feel very blessed to have her around me and to grow with her in the next part of my life and just be someone around me forever, because he really did pick well with who we are run the real love story.
Everyone has an X is a Minti Media production and proudly you're part of the Muma mea network's written and narrated by me Georgia Love and produced by Linda Scott. If you have a story you'd like to share email podcast at momamea dot com dot au. You can support us by following the show in your favorite podcast app and leaving a five star review. We'll see you for the next episode.
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What a Dirty Dog is? Josh? If you want to listen to more episodes, if everyone has an X, there's a link in the show notes of this episode, and make sure you follow the show. I've been binging this show. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did.