iPhone XS Why has my iPhone Combined one of my Contacts?

[robjulo]

My wife has two phones, one for work and one for personal. There are times I would like to message only one phone or the other, however several months ago, my iPhone decided to "combine" both of her contacts such that all the messages (to both phones) are in one thread, and there seems to be no way to differentiate what messages went to what phone.

I previously deleted both of her contacts, even renamed one of them to her name with (work) next to her name, and it is still doing the same thing.

For example, I messaged her this morning. It went to her personal phone, yet when I purposefully try to message the work phone, the message that went to the personal phone shows up in the message threads to the work phone. It is clearly lumping them all into one person.

If I go to my iPad, they are separate, it's only doing this on my iPhone.

I don't want these contacts combined, how do I fix it?

 

[BuggyGT]

Try this, on both of your work and personal phones go into the Settings > Messages > Send & Receive. If you see 2 numbers listed there, only leave checked the number that corresponds to that device.

This should split up the messages correctly.

 

[robjulo]

Thanks....I'll check that out.

 

[akash.nu]

If your wife is using the same iCloud account on both the phones then by default iMessage will combine them but even if you change the send and receive settings as mentioned earlier, you’ll still need to delete the existing conversation to start a fresh. Hope that’s ok.