Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
Battle of the exes!
Sparks fly when a couple move in with the man’s former girlfriend to see if they can all thrash out their differences
Ask Ashleigh Ross about her first impressions of her ex-boyfriend’s new partner Donna Anderson and she was clearly far from impressed. ‘She sounded like a bit of a nightmare,’ she confesses. And Donna had a similar view of Ashleigh. ‘I didn’t know her but I knew she was making my life difficult,’ she says.
Hardly a harmonious situation, especially when you consider that Matt Slimm, 33, the man who links them both, is not fond of his ex either. ‘I don’t like holding grudges – but there is a big one when it comes to Ashleigh,’ he says.
So big, in fact, that for months they weren’t on speaking terms, less still able to be in the same room, making the notion that they could all live under one roof seem laughable. Yet that’s what these three did for four nights earlier this summer, all in front of the TV cameras for the first programme of a planned Channel 5 series in which divorced or separated parents move in together along with the new wife or partner to try to iron out their differences.
There is, as you might expect, no shortage of tears and fireworks once Matt, Donna, 31, and Ashleigh,
28, get together. Relations between the trio were at rock bottom when filming started: supermarket worker Matt hadn’t seen his daughter with Ashleigh, four-year-old Bella, for six months. ‘I felt I had nothing to lose by trying this,’ he says. Meanwhile, mother- of- four Donna, whose youngest, Grace, fathered by Matt, was just five months old, was at the end of her tether. ‘All the fighting was incredibly draining,’ she says. ‘I felt we had to give it a go.’
Ashleigh was more reluctant. ‘I’d have preferred mediation,’ she says. ‘But my anxiety was at an all-time high, so something had to give.’
It certainly did – and few people would have put money on hostilities ceasing, given that Matt and Ashleigh – who separated nearly three years ago – can’t even agree on why they broke up. Matt believes it was because they’d not had much time as a couple before becoming parents – Ashleigh was pregnant within six months. She has a different version. ‘ Mat t wasn’t very mature and wasn’t ready to be a dad,’ she says. The tone was set, she says, when on her due date he spent the evening at a work do and got ‘blind drunk’. What both agree on – just about – is that by the time Bella was two the relationship was over. At first the split was civil, with Matt looking after his daughter while Ashleigh worked. Then, eight months later, he met Donna in the pub. ‘I wasn’t looking for love but I asked him to come and sit with me,’ Donna recalls. ‘And that was that.’
Initially the pair’s relations with Ashleigh were cordial, but when Matt and Donna moved in together things soured. ‘Ash couldn’t deal with the fact I had this other life,’ says Matt. ‘She had lost control.’ Matters came to a head when there was a misunderstanding about who was picking up Bella from nursery one day. ‘After that Ashleigh stopped the contact,’ says Matt. Ashleigh says she stopped him seeing Bella when he refused to give out Donna’s contact details or their address.
All three admit that on the first day of filming, when Matt, Donna and Grace arrived to stay at Ashleigh’s home, the atmosphere was grim. An early row was over Ashleigh’s three cats. ‘I’ve had a fear of cats since childhood,’ say Donna. ‘Ashleigh did put them outside but they were still around so I felt tense, especially as I was breastfeeding Grace.’ Ashleigh, in turn, says she was ‘extremely accommodating’– particularly as she knew Donna was prone to letting rip behind her back. ‘I overheard her slagging me off when she thought I couldn’t hear,’ she says.
But soon the two women began to find common ground. ‘The turning point for me was when I found that Donna had the same problems with Matt that I did when we were together – he made her feel very insecure,’ says Ashleigh. ‘I tackled Matt about it.’ For Donna this was a show of solidarity. ‘Ashleigh also admitted she could have gone about things better. It wasn’t an apology, but it felt like one.’
Today, they say the experiment was a success: Matt has access to Bella, and the women are no longer at loggerheads. ‘We’ll never be best friends but we can get along,’ says Ashleigh. ‘And it’s good that Bella sees her father. He’s a terrible boyfriend but a good dad.’