When Capsule reader Alana* read our recent story on the podcast Love Trapped – a bizarre story about a woman who allegedly faked a pregnancy, she immediately messaged her husband. The story felt eerily familiar…
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.
When she thinks back to the very beginning, it’s how easy everything was that strikes Alana.
She and Tim had met on a dating app – they exchanged a few messages and then arranged to meet up on a Saturday afternoon. The quick cup of coffee together soon turned into a couple of glasses of wine and rolled into dinner. Nearly 12 hours later, Alana headed home – with plans already made to see Tim the next evening.
“It was all so easy,” says Alana. “It was like walking straight into the middle of a relationship. We skipped the beginning bit, the awkward bit where you’re like, ‘what’s going on, are we dating, do I like you, are we in a relationship?’ It wasn’t over-the-top, it was just comfortable and easy and quick.”
A month in, Alana felt more settled than she’d ever felt in a relationship. Yes, it was quick, but she felt that her and Tim would be together for the long haul.
“I remember I was driving to Tim’s from work and the sun was shining and I felt so happy,” says Alana.
Which is when she got a call from Tim, who sounded flustered. He said something had come up and he was going to be late – so maybe Alana should stay at her place. Alana asked if everything was okay and Tim reassured her he was fine – but she wasn’t convinced.
“Something was definitely off,” she says.
She messaged him in the morning and they made plans to meet at her house after work. Alana was on tenterhooks the whole day – she knew something was up, she was just hoping it wasn’t the worst case scenario she was imagining in her head.
Instead he had something to share with her that completely blind-sided her.
His ex-girlfriend had got in touch. She was pregnant.
Alana says Tim told her on that first date that he’d had a longterm relationship and had been single for more than a year after that. Then he’d had a relationship with a woman for about three months, but they just weren’t right for each other, so he broke things off. Six weeks later he met Alana.
Alana was in shock – and so, it seemed, was Tim.
“He looked pale and his voice was shaking when he told me,” she says. “He kept apologising. I still wanted to be with him but, oh man, it was a lot.”
Tim’s ex, Rachel, said that she had only just found out, but she was about 11 weeks along and it was definitely Tim’s baby. She wanted his input as to whether to keep the baby – she only had a few days to decide.
“Tim didn’t tell me this at the time, but Rachel was so angling to get back together,” says Alana. “She sent him a bunch of messages about maybe it being a sign they should get back together and be together.”
Tim told Alana he hadn’t said anything, but he’d seen Rachel at a restaurant when they were out at dinner a week earlier. They didn’t say anything to each other, but she definitely saw that he was out with someone new.
It was just a few weeks ago that Alana saw a Capsule story about the podcast Love Trapped – a story about a woman who allegedly faked a pregnancy – and she immediately sent it to Tim, saying “sound familiar?!”
While Rachel was 11-weeks pregnant and trying to work out whether to keep the baby, she was in fairly constant contact with Tim.
“She sent so many messages,” says Alana. “At first Tim was really caring and understanding but she kept going. Tim sent her a message saying that this decision was now up to her – that he was sorry but he didn’t want to pursue a relationship with her. She sent a bunch more messages – Tim had no idea what to do. Then finally she sent a message saying she’d booked to have an abortion. It had all been so stressful – Tim was relieved, like we could finally put this behind us.”
But the next week, Rachel sent a message saying that she hadn’t been able to go through with it.
“We were watching TV when he got the message and his face just fell,” she says. “He was just so worried that now this woman was going to be in our lives forever. I felt sick. I’d told a few friends at this point and I knew they were thinking that I should cut my losses, because the relationship was so new. My mum thought the same.”
For two months Tim received messages from Rachel about the baby. He wanted to do the right thing – spend time with the child, pay his share, but was trying to work out how that might look.
Then, when Rachel would have been five months pregnant, Tim and Alana were at a bar, celebrating a friend’s engagement. When, across the bar, they saw Rachel.
“She was drinking – and she had a flat stomach,” says Alana.
Tim stormed over and asked, “what happened to being pregnant?!”.
“Rachel was clearly not pregnant,” says Alana. “She looked immediately guilty when Tim went over. Her friends all looked at her, shocked.”
It was immediately obvious that Rachel wasn’t pregnant – and as far as her friends knew, she’d never been pregnant.
“Tim’s immediate thought was that she must have had the abortion,” says Alana. “He asked why she didn’t tell him she got an abortion and she said she didn’t get one, so he asked if she had a miscarriage and she said no. He asked if she had been pregnant and she said she thought she could have been.”
Alana says she and Tim were in shock – and were both livid. Rachel left immediately while the pair tried to get their heads around what had happened.
“We had spent the last two months of our three-month relationship thinking that he was going to be having a baby with his ex-girlfriend,” says Alana. “I had second guessed staying with him so many times. It had been so stressful. To find out she made it all up, was… I don’t know… there aren’t words for it. Beyond shocking.”
Half an hour later, Tim got a text message from Alana saying she was very sorry for not telling Tim the whole truth and she hoped in time he would forgive her. The next morning Tim sent her a message outlining the impact her lies had – and then he blocked her.
“I had so many questions,” says Alana. “We both did – like, what was her plan here? How long was she going to keep going? Was she going to fake having the baby? Or fake losing it? Or come clean? It was so twisted. When we talked about it though, we decided it was best to just shut the door on it – not have any contact. It seemed like that’s what she wanted from it – to have this thing to contact Tim about. Maybe she thought she could get him back. I still feel curious about it, but I think going no-contact was best.”
Tim and Alana have now been married for several years and have a child of their own. They haven’t seen Rachel since that night in the bar.
“I think it’s testament to how strong our connection is that Tim and I made it through those two months,” says Alana. “It’s a long time ago now, but I still feel sad that we were put in that position and how stressful that time was. We came pretty close to losing our relationship. It still boggles my mind that she could lie – and for so long. But, after listening to the Love Trapped podcast, I know it could have been worse!”
*names have been changed
