Capsule reader Amanda was horrified to discover her boyfriend copied his last relationship – right down to where he chose to propose to her. Here’s her story of how it all unfolded…
Welcome to our series, The Love Diaries – a space for you to share your experiences, advice, fairy-tale endings, setbacks and heartbreaks. We’ll be hearing from industry experts giving practical advice alongside Capsule readers (You!) sharing your firsthand experiences with love – from the woman who cheated on her husband with a work colleague, one woman’s temptation now the love of her life is finally single (although she’s not), and the woman who forced her husband to choose between her and his girlfriend.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Send an email to alice@capsulenz.com!
Amanda was on cloud nine. Her boyfriend of two-and-a-half years had proposed to her on the dreamy white sands of Aitutaki in the gorgeous Cook Islands.
They’d spent two nights unwinding in Rarotonga, then packed up and headed for another two nights on the magical little island, many refer to as the honeymooner’s island.
“I’d thought he was really nervous about getting on the little plane,” says Amanda, “but even after we landed he was still shaky. It all made sense when he got down on one knee!”
The plan had been to propose at sunset, but Paul – her now fiancé – sped things along, with his nerves unable to get him through the day.
It’d all seemed so perfect… that is until a few weeks after they got home.
Then, one piece of information changed things for Amanda and completely unraveled her relationship with Paul.
A year down the track, she’s really still coming to terms with it – which is why she got a little jolt when she watched the latest season of Nobody Wants This.
Yes, that funny little romantic comedy TV series, starring Adam Brody and Kristen Bell. If you’re not already familiar with it, the premise of the show is that a romance develops between two opposites: Noah (Adam Brody) is a Rabbi, potentially about to become head rabbi, coming out of a relationship with his long-term girlfriend whom everybody loved. Joanne (Kristen Bell) is a very forthright podcaster, who is trying to sign the deal of her lifetime for the podcast hosted by her and her sister, which is all about them discussing being the “slutty single sisters” and their dating exploits in LA.
So, what does this have to do with Amanda and Paul? Well, if you’ve seen the show, there’s an episode in Season 2 called ‘Valentine’s Day’ – and, without too many spoilers here, Joanne receives a gift from Noah that immediately looks familiar. It’s a fancy necklace – a Jennifer Meyer engravable necklace with her name on etched into it (a side note here: these necklaces retail for a cool US$1,550!). The issue is, she knows from stalking his ex-girlfriend’s Instagram, that he gave her the exact same necklace (with a different name on it, obviously!).
This sends Joanne into a bit of a spiral because she feels Noah slips into a mode where he is playing the role of being a boyfriend, which all feels detached, impersonal and strange.
This is the part that Amanda understood and felt deeply.
“I watched that show, and couldn’t believe how it immediately took me back to having that exact sinking feeling in my stomach,” she says.
See, a few weeks after she got back from honeymoon she was having a drink with her friend who she met Paul through in the first place. Her friend Sarah, who she worked with for years, had gone to university with Paul and they’d first met at a housewarming she threw.
When Amanda proudly showed her the ring, Sarah said:
“I knew that Paul was going to propose as soon as you said you were going to Aitutaki.”
So far so good – a lot of people had said a similar thing, and honestly, Amanda wondered it herself when Paul suggested it. Aitutaki is one of the most romantic spots in the Pacific.
But Sarah hadn’t quite finishing speaking.
“It’s where he does all his proposing!” she said. And then immediately looked mortified.
She tried to walk back her words and quickly move on, but Amanda stopped her. What did she mean by that.
Clearly distressed, Sarah said she had put her foot in it, but Paul had been engaged before – Amanda knew this – and maybe she should ask him where the proposal took place.
“I was completely flustered, but tried to keep going with Sarah,” says Amanda. “In the end though, we didn’t stick around long and I headed home.”
But first, she opened up Instagram.
She’d tried to snoop through Paul’s ex-fiance’s page before, but it was private. This time though, her Instgram was public.
There, in the car park of a little group of shops she’d pulled into, she started scrolling and scrolling back.
Her stomach dropped.
“It could have been my feed,” Amanda says.
First, she found the Aitutaki beach proposal photos. It was incredibly similar – except, Paul had obviously made it to sunset the first time around.
“Terribly, one of my first thoughts, was, ‘how was he so nervous if he’d already done the same thing before?’” she says.
The ring was similar, but Amanda knew she’d dropped enough hints about what shape she wanted (pear) that he knew what she was after.
But the further she scrolled back, the sicker she felt.
There were pictures of the two of them in the little corner spot of a restaurant that was very familiar to Amanda. It was a spot she thought of as special to her and Paul – a little nook in a restaurant that was far from where they lived, but they often headed to for dinner, always sitting in that same spot if they could.
There was the cute café Amanda thought that she and Paul had ‘found’ on a road trip, that they’d returned to twice since.
“She was also carrying a bag in one of the photos that is identical to the one that Paul got me for my 30th,” says Amanda. “I didn’t know whether Paul bought her the same one as a gift too, or whether he, I don’t know, just knew she liked that bag so figured he’d buy me one too, or, did he want me to be like her so bought that bag? It was just… none of it seemed like a good outcome.”
The closer she looked, the more she saw – a trip to Cirque du Soleil for her birthday (he’d given her the same gift), holidays to the same destinations… it made Amanda feel incredibly uncomfortable.
“I took screenshots, in case she made her profile private again,” says Amanda. “And because I was afraid I was going to accidentally like something from five years ago!”
Then, she headed home to confront Paul.
“I was thinking of how to say it, all the way home, but instead, as soon as I saw him, I burst into tears,” she says.
Paul was immediately defensive when she talked about the proposal being so similar.
“He said, ‘everyone goes to Aitutaki to get engaged. It’s the most romantic place to go, so I was obviously going to go to the best place you can go for that.’ But when I said, y’know, wouldn’t you want to go some place different the second time. Or maybe it’s less romantic when you’ve done it there before with someone else, he got quite angry.”
“He said, ‘why wouldn’t you want the fairytale proposal, like the best one you could have?. That’s what you wanted. You said it was the dream proposal.’ He couldn’t really understand why I was upset. Even when I said I didn’t want ‘the’ dream proposal, I wanted ‘our’ dream proposal – something that was significant to both of us and not recycled from his last relationship.”
That’s when Amanda brought up everything she’d seen on his ex’s Instagram: the restaurant, the holidays, the bag.
“He said he’d Googled what the best gift to get for a signficiant birthday and that’s what’d come up, and his ex had liked it so he’d figured it was true. And he’d Googled where to go in the North Island for a romantic road trip, and that’s what came up. He just didn’t get that I didn’t want him to ask google what I might like – he should know what I might like. But, more importantly, don’t do the same thing you did with an ex! How impersonal.”
Amanda says she’d gone from being so thrilled about the proposal to being embarrassed. She felt humiliated when she thought about how she’d told Paul’s mum the story of him proposing.
“She would have been smiling and nodding, like, ‘I’ve heard this story before’,” she says.
Amanda says their relationship limped on for another six months, before they called it quits.
“Everything was different after I found that out – nothing felt quite real to me anymore,” she says. “All this distance seemed to happen between us because of it too.”
Now, three years on, Amanda has been in a relationship for one year.
“We had this turning point in our relationship about four months in,” she says. “It was his birthday and I wanted to take him out for dinner and I said this place we should go. He said, ‘oh, nah, do you mind if we go somewhere else? Not to be weird, but I went there with my ex for a birthday once’. It was like, it opened some door for me somehow and we talked about his exes and what happened with mine and I felt so much closer to him. And it was cathartic too, I think, hearing someone who didn’t know anything about it, feeling the same as me, that my ex’s behaviour was totally off.”
“It’s a shame, in a way, because I really did love that restaurant I used to go to with Paul, but it also feels great to never go back.”
