But fate stepped in and the pair later reconnected through friends at Edinburgh’s Festival Fringe.
“The first night was overnight romance!” the House Husbands star told WHO in 2018 of their first hook up.
“But he called me the next day, so we were already on the right track. I’d usually date someone and get around five or six months in and be bored, though I never got sick of him.
“I never got to that bit where I was like: ‘now I have to offload you.’ We’re still not there yet and I get joy from seeing him every day.”
The idea that they were all in from the get-go is a sentiment she echoed in an interview with the Australian Women’s Weekly the same year.
"Dan was my matching half from night one", she said. "He's ruined my stand-up for man bashing because it's really not true."
Julia, who married Dan in Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve in 2005 and share two kids (Ruby, born 2006 and Sophie, born 2008), added that as the couple clock up more and more years in their relationship, the glue that holds them together is more important than ever.
"As the years go on and you're raising children there has to be a real ballast of best friend there,” she told The Weekly.
“Because if anything is going to blow apart, it will blow apart from having kids. If he ever wants to entice me into la boudoir, he just has to unpack the dishwasher. Nothing starts mummy up like all the washing done. Oh you sexy man."
Despite their obvious love and affection for one another, no marriage can ever be completely smooth sailing – and Julia and Dan haven’t been immune to life’s pitfalls.
Throughout their relationship Julia has suffered devastating miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy while Dan endured a battle with breast cancer in 2012.
Speaking to Show + Tell in 2014, Julia opened up about the moment she realised she was having a miscarriage midway through a flight from South Africa to London.
“I couldn’t call Dan, I couldn’t do anything about it,” she revealed.
“I was sitting next to a comic friend of mine and I came back from the bathroom and he said ‘How big is the s**t you were doing to be in the bathroom that long?’ And, talk about making someone feel awkward, I said ‘I think I’m miscarrying’. And he was like ‘Oh my God’ because he had kids.”
Explaining that she doesn’t like to dwell on negative experiences too much, Julia added: “There’s something about admitting something is f**ked and drawing a line under it.”
Meanwhile, Julia told Good Health in 2020 that one of the secrets to their successful marriage is that they act as sounding boards and counsellors to one another and try to discuss any issues that arise openly before they bubble over into bigger dramas.
And even though they’ve been together for almost 20 years, Julia insisted the partnership is still going strong.
"We were married on New Year's Eve 2005, but we've been together since 2002. And it has been nothing but joy!" she told the publication, with a hint at sarcasm.
"He's never ready to kill me and I'm never ready to kill him!"
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