‘I looked up and he was laughing his head off and thought it was funny’: Secret behind Fifi Box’s new relationship

Her daughter’s tantrum in the playground prompted Fifi Box’s chance meeting with her now-boyfriend, as the radio star details how the pair’s romance started.

During a family holiday in Fiji last year, Fifi Box and her daughters – Trixie, now 11, and Daisy, 4 – were indulging in an array of treats from a breakfast buffet and laughing in the sunshine, unaware they were being observed.

A traveller on vacation with a girlfriend approached the radio host, telling her that her obvious delight in single motherhood had led her to reconsider her life plans.

“This woman had just come through a break-up, and she’d been at a table nearby at the breakfast buffet,” Box recalls during her photo shoot and interview with Stellar.

“She told me, ‘Seeing you with your girls made me decide that that’s the path I want to follow and I don’t have to find a man to go down that path, or try to repair a fractured relationship just to have a baby.’”

Fifi Box with her daughters Daisy, left, and Trixie. Picture: Steven Chee for Stellar

Last Mother’s Day, Box told Stellar that she became the mum she always wanted to be the moment she decided to have a second child without a partner. Although proud to be a single mum to Trixie – who Box shares with her former partner, Ironman Grant Kenny – she says she considered her family to be complete when she conceived Daisy via IVF and a sperm donor.

Now, a year on, she tells Stellar, “I’m lucky that my parents and my grandmother – who was there for the first three months of Trixie’s life – all accepted the decisions I’ve made in my life.”

And Box, 47, has a national platform through which she can share her experiences as a single mother, thanks to her regular appearances on the panels of current affairs show The Project and comedy quiz Have You Been Paying Attention? as well as her radio gig on the Fifi, Fev & Nick breakfast show she co-hosts with Brendan Fevola and Nick Cody on Melbourne station 101.9 The Fox.

Even so, she doesn’t regard herself as a spokesperson for unconventional choices and can see many paths to parenting. After all, Box says, she knows what it’s like to hear your biological clock ticking in your 30s.

Yet she remains disappointed by the notion that relationships are a necessary prerequisite to having a family.

“When I talk to women, or even friends of mine, and they say, ‘I love what you’ve done Fi, but I want to fall in love and have children,’ I look at them and say, ‘Why does the falling in love have to come first?’ That is a model we all grew up with in fairytales and Disney, and that’s wonderful and picture perfect, but why is it the only option? Just because you have children on your own … What, you can never fall in love or have a relationship? Shifting that paradigm is important.”

‘Mum lives, quite literally, across the road like in Everybody Loves Raymond.’ Picture: Steven Chee for Stellar

Proving her theory that children first can lead to love later, she points to her boyfriend of 10 months, Rocky Mangano.

While she had her eye on the man dubbed “hot dad” by some of the mums at Trixie’s school when she first noticed him, she only started chatting to him when Daisy, then 3, had a meltdown in the playground.

“She was throwing a bit of a tantrum and I was trying to manage it,” Box recalls. “I looked up and he was laughing his head off and thought it was funny. That started a conversation, and the rest is history.”

While the pair don’t have a lot of time for romantic dates, Box says the fact that Mangano, 47, is a parent of two children aged 12 and 13 means that their lives are compatible. “He shares the kids but for both of us our kids are our priority and he’s so supportive and understanding of me and the kind of a mum I am,” she explains.

“I’m very hands-on, but it’s just lovely meeting somebody who’s in a similar space. We enjoy our time together and then we have our time with our kids. It’s great.”

While both successful and indomitable, Box – who was recently voted the nation’s most likeable radio host in the Australian Talent Index’s 2024 Top Talent Report – is the first to acknowledge the support she receives from her parents, Pearl and Alan, who divorced when she was 10.

“Mum lives, quite literally, across the road like in Everybody Loves Raymond, so she’s always there for practical help like babysitting or running over to help me with the girls at any moment,” Box says. “To be a single parent without that tribe or village around you is almost impossible and my heart goes out to women who don’t have that kind of support.”

Her mother’s devotion and strength have been huge assets, too.

“All through our childhood, she was children first,” Box says of growing up with her two brothers, Cameron and Kiernan. “I felt that my mum lived and breathed for me and I’ve definitely taken that from her.” That said, Box also acknowledges that Mother’s Day can look vastly different for everyone, and prompt some complex feelings. “It’s definitely an emotionally charged day that can be joyous for some and sad for others,” she continues, adding, “I think in all our lives it will be both happy and sad at different stages.”

With Trixie’s teenage years around the corner, Box is trying not to be a helicopter parent. “I’m going to try to let them live their lives and learn,” she says. “But I find myself so often saying to Trixie, ‘Honey, can I teach you one lesson I wish I’d known …’”

While Trixie loves horse riding and tennis and wants to play soccer, Box says she also enjoyed taking part in the young surf lifesavers Nippers program as her dad watched on, and that the tween has inherited Kenny’s love of the surf.

“They’re not my genes!” Box insists with a laugh. “So I’d definitely say they’re his.”

Having always been open about how their family was created, Box says her relationship with her girls is built around candour and love.

“You can’t go wrong with honesty,” she explains. “[And] without sounding like a Richard Curtis movie, I really believe that if you love your kids, no matter how difficult or unique your circumstances are around your lifestyle or their upbringing, love will conquer all and get you there in the end.”

To see Stellar’s special Mother’s Day cover story featuring Brooke Blurton, Sarah Davidson, Fifi Box and Ellie Gonsalves pick up a copy inside The Sunday Telegraph (NSW), Sunday Herald Sun (VIC), The Sunday Mail (QLD) and Sunday Mail (SA).

For more from Stellar, listen to the latest episode of Something To Talk About below:

Originally published as ‘I looked up and he was laughing his head off and thought it was funny’: Secret behind Fifi Box’s new relationship