She may not have found her perfect match during any of her three stints in the villa, but Love Island’s Liberty Poole definitely won herself a legion of loyal fans throughout her appearances on the 2021 series, Love Island Games and All Stars.
But it all worked out for her in the romance stakes anyway, as earlier this year, Liberty went public with her boyfriend Joshua Raybould.
The pair soft-launched their relationship on social media over the summer, with Liberty inadvertently sparking rumours she was dating former TOWIE star Pete Wicks in the process. To be fair, Pete and Josh do look very similar.
Although they’ve only started dating this year, it turns out that Liberty and Josh have actually known each other for years. They met before she found fame on Love Island, but she initially rejected his advances because she believed he was a ‘bad boy’.
Liberty and Josh popped into Closer HQ earlier this week for one of their first interviews as a couple, where she exclusively told us about how they first met.
‘Me and Josh actually met when I was 19, but you did club promotion,’ Liberty began, before turning to her boyfriend. ‘And I thought he was a bit of a bad boy, so I kept pieing him off, which makes no sense because my taste on Love Island was worse.’
Ooh, was that Jake Cornish shade? Or perhaps at dig at her All Stars love interest Mitch Taylor. Neither treated Liberty particularly well on the show…
Josh said, ‘I kept trying, didn’t I? It was thousands and thousands of DMs, that was. I asked you on a date about four times before you actually said yes. Never give up kids.’
The couple are clearly meant to be as Liberty continued, ‘We kept bumping into each other as well, like in Ibiza we bumped into each other and just randomly, it was so strange. It was the invisible string theory.’
It seems Liberty and Josh could be about to take a major step in their relationship too, as she’s just bought a house and the pair have spoken out moving in together. We love a happy ending.
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Nathan Katnoria is heat and Closer online’s senior digital writer. He became obsessed with Love Island when Malin Andersson came back to confront Terry Walsh in series two and hasn’t looked back since. When he’s not interviewing former Islanders, Nathan is scrolling through their Instagram feeds for relationship updates and piping hot tea.