If TV One cooking show My Kitchen Rules NZ has taught “Corporate Dads” Josh King and Aaron Gascoigne anything, it’s never to take life too seriously.
With four children and three businesses between them, life is always hectic for the Auckland mates and their gorgeous wives Nicola and Jacinta.
But it was after both couples experienced an “absolute year from hell” that Josh and Aaron thought, “Bugger it,” and applied for MKR, figuring it was now or never.
“We just had so many losses in the family,” Josh explains. “We had four deaths in about two weeks. In fact, the day Aaron rang me up to tell me we’d made it onto MKR, my dad passed away. It was crazy.”
“We’d all had a pretty crap year before this,” agrees Aaron’s wife Jacinta, “so it was nice for the boys to be able to get away from everything and go and have fun – have a little break from the real world, I guess!”
Josh and Aaron were away filming MKR NZ for three months.
The time away from reality, however, has meant a lot of work for Nicola and Jacinta, so much so that Josh and Aaron have dubbed their wives “the MKR widows”.
“We were away for three months,” says Aaron, who runs an investment firm and a male fertility supplement company. “It was tough at times.”
“There’s no way we could have done it without them,” adds Josh, who is the national sales manager for a technology firm. “They did everything. We did feel a bit guilty about it,
but we knew they could do it. They’re amazing.”
Many nights spent at each other’s houses kept Nicola and Jacinta sane. It was the two women who introduced Josh and Aaron to each other five years ago, after meeting at their children’s kindergarten.
Aaron and Jacinta’s romance began when he offered her a job rather than a pick-up line – even though she turned it down!
“We’re besties,” says Nicola. “We just hit it off when we first met, so the four of us have been hanging out for a few years now.
“One of the best things about the show has been that the four of us are much closer now. Me and Jacinta always were, and the guys were mates, but now we’re just so much tighter. I used to be polite to Aaron, but now I yell at him like he’s my husband too!”
The men agree – but while Aaron’s happy to use the term “bromance”, Josh isn’t so sure.
“We often say they’re in love with each other,” grins Nicola, while Josh puts his head in his hands. “This is coming out all wrong!” he laments as the others roar with laughter.
While everyone gets along now, neither romance started off fantastically, the men reveal.
“I fell for Jacinta at university in 1997,” Aaron grins. “I saw her walking through management class, and I said to my mate, ‘I’m going to marry that girl.’
“I was working for DB Breweries at the time, and I saw her at the pub one night. I couldn’t just say hi… so I offered her a job.” That job was being a DB promo girl, parading around the pubs offering free drinks.
“I was really excited,” recalls Jacinta. “It was $50 an hour! I called my dad and told him, and he said, ‘I’ll pay you not to do it,’ and he did! So I never took the job.” Nonetheless, it was the beginning of a beautiful romance.
A few years later, Josh spotted Nicola in a sushi restaurant in Los Angeles.
“He got my number and he called me, but I couldn’t understand a word he was saying because his accent was so thick,” she laughs.
Nicola married Josh just eight months after she caught his eye in an LA restaurant.
Nicola says even though she made “excuse after excuse” to avoid meeting up with him, he ended the call with a cheery, “Okay, see you Saturday night!”
But proving that persistence pays off, the pair fell in love – so quickly that Nicola accompanied Josh back to New Zealand two and a half weeks later and married him eight months after that first date. “And I wasn’t pregnant, just for the record!” adds Nicola, now mum to Caden (8) and Connor (5).
Sharing the same fierce ambition and determination, it seems only natural that Josh and Aaron would team up for MKR, after Aaron saw an ad on TV.
“I just needed someone to come on the show with me,” he says. “So I thought, ‘Who’s man enough?’ and that only left me with one option!”
Josh recalls Aaron contacting him urgently. “I had no idea what he was on about. Turns out, he’d already entered us.” And it’s been all go ever since.
“The kids are so excited,” Jacinta says of Jack (9) and Ava (3). “Every time they see Aaron on TV, it’s, ‘Look! There’s Dad!’”
For Aaron and Jacinta, taking time away from their company Vitamenz was challenging. The business was formed after the couple experienced “six years of fertility hell” in between the births of their children. After many rounds of IVF, Aaron and Jacinta created a supplement for men (formed after consulting the “best fertility minds around the world”). The result, they say, is their beautiful daughter Ava.
But though MKR has taken the guys away from their businesses, the pair wouldn’t change a thing – and neither would Nicola and Jacinta.
“They’ve tried so hard and handled it so well,” says Nicola. ”We couldn’t be prouder.”
