Tiger King Star Joe Exotic's Ex-Husband John Finlay Says His Fiancée Has 'Given Me a Better Life'

Tiger King‘s John Finlay has a new love in his life.

Finlay, 35, was briefly married to Joseph “Joe Exotic” Maldonado-Passage, the subject of the hit Netflix documentary, in an untraditional three-way wedding in 2014 after meeting him while working at Maldonado-Passage’s exotic animal zoo in Wynnewood, Oklahoma.

He left the union and the zoo later that year. Today, he’s six years clean from meth and engaged to a woman named Stormey, whom he tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story he’s been with since 2019 after meeting online.

The ex-zoo staffer now works as a welder and hopes “to work with youth” to fight addiction, and Stormey is an accountant, he says. The two live together in Oklahoma.

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Finlay admits he’s “not really a people person,” but says Stormey is “trying to change that” — and has drastically helped build up his self-esteem.

“My fiancée has been working on it,” he says. “I’ve had a better outlook on life with her. And she’s given me definitely a better life since we’ve been together.”

“I used to have a lot of pent-up negative thoughts and bad aura about myself,” he adds. “I just quit thinking about the past and the negative stuff that’s happened to me, and now I’m engaged and we’re having a really good life.”

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Up next for the couple? They’ll eventually be walking down the aisle. According to Finlay, they had a wedding date set for this summer, but had to rethink their plans amid the coronavirus pandemic.

“We’ve put things on hold because nobody would be able to travel or anything,” Finlay says. “So that date has yet to be set in stone yet.”

Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness is streaming now on Netflix.