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“Dating him is the right term, because that’s how it was — it wasn’t a throuple.”
It’s no secret that people love nothing more than to take a vague, unverified anecdote and run a mile with it, and nothing gives these half-truths (or in this case, totally false) narratives momentum quite like the internet.
On Wednesday 24 May, Joanne McNally and Vogue Williams invited special guest Una Healy onto their podcast, My Therapist Ghosted Me, to give her a zero pressure, light hearted platform from which to tell her own story in her own words. Dispelling the much-talked about speculation that she was in a throuple, Healy made clear that it was actually just a plain old casual open relationship.
In a nutshell, rumours began circulating that the singer was in a throuple with former heavyweight boxing champion David Haye and model Sian Osborne when Una shared a photo of David and Sian captioned: “I’ve started 2023 in a comfortable place, feeling genuinely happy and at peace. Here’s to this year being ours x.”
David followed up with his own Instagram post of the trio, with the caption: “If a picture says a thousand words, then this one says exactly what it needs to. I’ve started Jan first with the correct energy, surrounding myself with understanding beautiful human beings, who do not judge, but instead accept me for my authentic self.”
They met online last summer, connecting on Raya and moving to Whatsapp, where Una enquired as to what it was he was looking for in a relationship. Fresh out of a relationship, Hayes said that he didn’t believe the traditional relationship model exists anymore, which wasn’t what the monogamous Una was after. Regardless, the pair began a casual relationship with an awareness that Hayes was seeing other people.
As time went on, Hayes was adamant that Una and Sian ought to meet, and though they did spend Christmas together in Morocco, the pair never became firm friends or romantically involved. As Una put it: “There was no dynamic there. She’s not my girlfriend, he’s both of our boyfriend and I decided, I’m out — you can have him. He can have whoever he wants because I know one will never be enough for him.”
“This throuple was existing in print, but in reality, I’m actually at home in Thurles looking after my kids. I was trolled to death,” Una said on the podcast.
After “unsubscribing from the team”, Hayes took to Instagram to wish a “Happy Valentine’s Day to the beautiful Queens in [his] life, making [his] world a better place to live in!” As a rebuttal, Una posted a photo of herself and David (no Sian) captioned, “It was only him,” and though she was quick to delete it, screenshots started circulating pretty much immediately.
“It sounds to me like you were just involved in a casual relationship with a guy you met on Raya,” Joanne succinctly puts it. “It sounds very much like it was his narrative to push, what he wanted people to think it was.” They go on to talk about David Hayes courting the press, and the double standard of men being lauded as heroes while women are hounded by trolls online.
At the end of the day, the message is clear: dear god, let’s just let people live. Do we really want to be spending our free time speculating on the private lives of celebrities, meme-ifying someone’s intimate relationship because it’s not the traditional model, and trolling a woman for being happy to keep things casual? No, we categorically do not.
Featured image via @unahealy on Instagram.