By the end of the first episode, contestants Lauren Speed and Cameron Hamilton got engaged — only five days after meeting each other.
New York-based psychotherapist Zoë Entin told Insider that falling in love tends to be a misnomer for people who are only beginning to form an intimate emotional connection.
“I think it’s possible for people to fall in love with their idea of someone very quickly,” she said. “However, there is no way to truly know someone in a short amount of time.”
Matt Barnett made a poor first impression on fellow contestant Diamond Jack when she told him her name during a pod date and he responded, “So, which strip club do you work at?”
“Hell, no!” she said. “Barnett, uh-uh. Keep moving!”
Pike told Morton that, while a lot of girls dealt with their “daddy issues” by vying for a man’s attention, she became her own “masculine influence” in her life.
He imitated snoring, then walked out of their date without giving Pike an explanation or telling her that he was leaving.
Jessica Batten found herself torn between contestants Matt Barnett and Mark Cuevas during the pod dates, but after Barnett told her on one date that “I would propose to you tomorrow,” she seemingly broke up with Cuevas after telling him that their 10-year age gap would make marriage between them difficult.
During Barnett and Batten’s next date, he went back on his comment and told her that he wasn’t sure about proposing to her.
“There’s people that don’t know what they want, and that’s you,” she responded. “I’m not even entertaining this conversation.”
Batten went on to get engaged to Cuevas, while Barnett got engaged to Pike.
“One thing that I don’t believe in is roles, or labels,” Gibelli explained. “I see you as my equal. I’m just as strong as you.”
She then asked Powers to marry her, and he accepted.
“It’s been 435 days,” Gibelli told Powers during their first night together, referencing how many days it had been since she’d last had sex.
The first “Love is Blind” breakup occurred between Morton and Jack. The two hit it off in the pods, but Morton was reluctant to tell his fiancée that he was bisexual for fear of being judged.
Once the show’s couples headed to Playa del Carmen, Mexico for a post-engagement getaway, Morton’s worries about when to disclose his sexuality made him very cagey around Jack. When Morton finally told her, he blew up, screaming “F—!” and leaving the room after she didn’t immediately respond.
The couple reunited the day after Morton came out to Jack, but things got worse. Jack told Morton that she couldn’t marry him after learning that he purposefully kept something “that big” from her. “This is why I don’t f— with b—-es like you!” Morton yelled in response as he threw his engagement ring into a pool.
Jack eventually threw a drink in his face and left, breaking off their engagement and time on the show.
“I know when we walk out of here, we’re going to be met with a lot of adversity,” Batten said after the couple got engaged in episode three. “I know friends and family will have their opinions.”
From Batten’s bridesmaids to Cuevas’ mom, no one seemed to have a problem with the couple’s age difference besides Batten herself. Even so, she constantly brought up their ages as the reason for her relationship doubts, rather than addressing other apparent problems between them (like her feelings for Barnett and their apparent lack of physical chemistry).
In the sixth episode of “Love Is Blind,” the couples moved in together, in order to briefly test out living together before their weddings.
Soon after Batten and Cuevas moved in together, she fought with him about whether or not he was truly ready to have children — all while her Golden Retriever followed the couple around their apartment.
As the argument progressed, Batten sat down with a glass of wine and let her dog drink some of it.
“She loves wine,” Batten said.
Jessica May, the lead vet at video vet service FirstVet, told Insider that feeding a dog alcohol can have serious consequences.
“Your dog may appear dazed or lethargic after drinking alcohol, and may also begin panting excessively or develop a high temperature,” May said. “In extreme cases of alcohol poisoning, dogs may suffer from muscle tremors, seizures or loss of consciousness.”
After Cuevas reassured Batten that he didn’t mind their age difference or the idea of having kids at 24, she was strangely disturbed by his openness.
“Mark is very emotionally available,” she said. “To me, it’s a bit of a red flag, because no guy is that emotionally available. I’ve never seen it.”
“Me and Mark are so dissimilar,” she told Barnett. “Like, you name it, we’re different.”
When he asked Batten why she accepted his proposal in spite of their supposed differences, she admitted, “I was coming down off of us. Caught up in the experience, yeah. There were 48 hours in the day. I thought about you for, like, 46 of those hours.”
To make things more complicated, both Cuevas and Pike (Barnett’s fiancée) were in the same room when she told him about her feelings.
Batten seemed intent on finding a way to make Barnett admit that he had doubts about his engagement to Pike.
She asked him whether he felt that they had an emotional or intellectual connection outside of their “physical, sexual thing,” mentioned that he seemed confused about who to propose to a few weeks earlier, and finished by adding that, because Pike wasn’t working, “Her whole life is you.”
Barnett simply responded, “I found someone who’s gonna love me a hundred percent.”
“Nothing will ever break the bond we made,” Batten said, before Barnett curtly added, “We had a friendship.”
She pressed on, telling him that, if things ended badly with Pike, Barnett should reach out to her. Pike, who was behind them and listened to the entire exchange, was predictably not pleased.
“I never felt like there was anything I had to worry about with my fiancé, but I felt like if [Batten] stepped over the line one more time, I would break her face,” Pike said.
Once the couple got engaged, they seemed to be searching for sources of conflict. They argued about banal problems ranging from Gibelli’s obsession with social media to Powers making her feel awkward at a party, but arguably the harshest exchange between them occurred in episode six.
When Powers told Gibelli that he didn’t like how much she yelled during fights, she suddenly said, “You know how you tell me this is the best sex of your life? Have you noticed that I don’t return the compliment?”
“I think Barnett is f—ing sexy and, like hot,” she told Cuevas after they attended Barnett’s birthday party together.
He was understandably hurt, and went to sleep on their living room couch as Batten drunkenly yelled, “Babe, come here!”
“If I get to the wedding day and Jessica says no, I’m more alone than I’ve ever been,” Cuevas told the camera.
One of the biggest potential obstacles in Hamilton and Speed’s relationship was that this was Speed’s first interracial relationship. When the couples met each other’s families in episode seven, she was nervous about how her parents would react to her fiancé.
When Hamilton first arrived at the Speed house, he met her mother, who asked about his involvement with a hip-hop group in college.
He then began to badly rap in front of both Speed and her mom, who seemed to enjoy his performance nonetheless.
Hamilton’s meeting with Speed’s father was tense, particularly since she had voiced her concerns about whether he would approve of her engagement.
“I’ve never introduced my dad to any of my boyfriends, let alone my fiancé, who is also white,” she said. “My dad is also very vocal about the black community, and keeping the black family structure strong.”
Speed’s father immediately asked Hamilton a series of “brutally honest” questions, such as why he didn’t ask for permission to marry his daughter, and whether Hamilton had ever been in a room full of black people.
“I’m not 100% with this,” he said at the end of their conversation. “I’m from a whole other generation. We didn’t pick a wife like this. But she loves you, so I like you.”
According to Speed, her father’s relationship with Hamilton has grown considerably since.
“My dad, he’s all in as long as I’m happy,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “He trusts my character, and he’s definitely grown to love Cameron. They have dinner every week. It’s great!”
“My parents are supportive of me, but I don’t know if they’re supportive of how this experience is going,” Powers explained. “I’m not going to make them do something they don’t wanna do.”
“You know how your parents are,” Gibelli protested. “You knew this would be a problem. You didn’t do anything to prevent it.”
“All I know is, before leaving to come here, Damian’s mom says, ‘Don’t marry some wh— off a reality TV show,” she added.
During one of their first frank discussions about their future together, Pike told Barnett that she has massive student loan debt, additional debt from buying makeup, and has recently been homeless because of her disinterest in finding a job.
“I am a little less responsible than Barnett in terms of my assets,” she explained. “I never really worked towards the future. I never thought about having a home. I was more of a ‘Work just enough, so that I could enjoy my life.'”
In contrast, Barnett had been working as an engineer full-time in the days leading up to their wedding, while Pike spent hours at home alone planning the ceremony.
In the ninth episode, the men and women had joint bachelor and bachelorette parties, and Batten dealt with her wedding doubts by getting extremely drunk.
“Jessica is a mess-ica tonight,” Speed said.
Later, she approached Pike and told her, “I won’t go after your dude,” proceeding to kiss her on the mouth.
Although multiple “Love Is Blind” contestants rejected their partners at the altar, Powers’ refusal to marry Gibelli was arguably the harshest moment in the finale.
Instead of explaining his decision to her in private, Powers went on to criticize Gibelli’s commitment issues in front of their wedding guests.
“I can’t handle the ups and downs of you loving me one day, and saying you want to be friends the next,” he said. “It would be selfish of me to marry you today, knowing as much as you tell me you’re ready, I see that you’re not.”
After Powers rejected Gibelli at their wedding, she fled the scene and ran away from the camera crew. To make matters worse, she tripped along the way, staining her wedding dress.
Gibelli’s mother, Milady, tracked her down after her daughter fled her wedding. Then, she proceeded to break down, and Gibelli had to comfort her right after being rejected at her own wedding.
“Ideally, you would have said no, and he would have said yes,” her mom said, crying. “Not the reverse, because this way it hurts more […] This shouldn’t happen. Who does that?”
Barnes and Chase seemed to have a relatively smooth relationship leading up to their wedding, although they struggled to connect sexually (Chase was hesitant to have sex with Barnes, for fear of not having an orgasm).
But Chase ultimately chose to turn her fiancé down at the altar, due to doubts about whether she was genuinely in love with him.
“I don’t have that same crazy infatuation for Kenny, as I did with [my ex-boyfriend],” she said. “That’s why I keep saying I’m not in love with him, because if I was in love, I would have that infatuation.”
“I absolutely adore you, and love you,” Chase told Barnes at their wedding ceremony. “I can’t marry you, and I hope that you can appreciate that and respect that decision of mine.”
When a cameraperson asked Barnes if he still wanted to marry Chase in the future, he said, “I really can’t answer that question now.”
“You have to respect that I’m telling you this,” Barnes continued. “Please stop recording this, because it’s not… That’s wrong. What you’re asking me.”
The first season followed five engaged couples, but only two of them actually got married — Matt Barnett and Amber Pike, and Cameron Hamilton and Lauren Speed.
During the “Love Is Blind” reunion special (which was filmed in February 2020), Gibelli and Powers revealed that they got back together mere hours after Powers rejected Gibelli during their wedding ceremony.
“Looking back, I respect his decision,” Gibelli said. “I feel like where we are now is so right for us. Where we can just date, and he has his own place, I have my own place. We’re getting to know each other at our own pace, and it’s just so refreshing.”
“We’ve been doing great,” she added. “We did move closer to the city now. Our house was haunted, y’all. Not a fan.”
“She thinks it was haunted, I think it was dust, whatever,” Barnett said.
“B—-, you’re shiesty,” Pike said, referencing how Batten flirted with her now-husband despite being engaged to Cuevas. “You’re so fake. Comin’ to my face like we were cool. You were so fake. I think you’re a very disingenuine person. And I hope seeing this, you do grow from it. Because that is not what the world needs, is women that go behind people’s backs like that.”
“You were engaged to another man that you were leading on,” she continued. “[Barnett] was engaged. He made his choice.”
“I apologize, and I have nothing but the most respect for you both,” Batten responded.
“If you still have feelings for my husband, and you’re engaged to [Cuevas], the least you can do is be honest with everybody else about where you were at,” Pike told Batten. “I accept the intent behind the apology. I can’t be fully there yet.”
While Powers and Speed were hardly shown interacting on the first season of “Love Is Blind,” they apparently formed a strong bond during their time in their pods.
“We had the best conversations,” Powers said. Speed confirmed, saying, “We would laugh all the time.”
Powers even noted that they often talked in “‘Star Wars‘ voices” together, and did his best Yoda impression.
“I’ve never felt that [Jack] was biphobic, homophobic,” Morton said. “I just was afraid that we would have some issues that we would have to work through […] I made a horrible mistake and indirectly called her out of her name.”
“I didn’t want it to get crazy and out of control,” Jack added. “I should’ve approached [Morton coming out as bisexual] a lot differently, and been more comforting.”
After apologizing to Jack for insulting her during their breakup, Morton got down on one knee in front of her.
“I’m not proposing to you,” he laughed, pulling out Jack’s engagement ring (which he threw in a pool in episode four). “I hope that you take this ring again as a significant piece of our friendship, and the start of something beautiful.”
During the “Love Is Blind” reunion special, Powers noted that he was convinced Gibelli wouldn’t say “I do” during their wedding.
“I thought she was going to be the one to say, ‘I don’t,’ and I was going to say, ‘Okay. I don’t either. I’ll walk away with you,'” he said. “I wish I could take the pain away from her that day […] That was the hardest decision I’ve probably ever made in my life, honestly. And I would stick by it again because of where we are now.”
“I was like, ‘This isn’t working,'” she noted. “We both are so stubborn and strong-minded and bull-headed. When we butt heads, it could be bad, it could be intense. So, figuring out how to handle that, it made a huge difference for us.”
“Actually, I looked down, ’cause I’ve seen it all,” she said. “I don’t need to see it again […] I just really didn’t like the person that I saw.”
“I was really uncomfortable [during filming], and I was drinking too much, and that was really disturbing to see play out,” Batten continued. “And some of the comments I made that were derogatory. And that certainly wasn’t fair to Mark, who’s a fantastic person.”
