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Warning: Love Is Blind season seven, episode 12 spoilers ahead.
Marissa George and Ramses Prashad’s breakup began long before Love Is Blind viewers were dropped into their final conversation in that depressing, under-decorated gray room. In fact, the beginning of the end was marked by a conversation Ramses had with a friend two days prior.
“I remember looking at him and thinking, This is somehow going to fuck us up,” Marissa tells Glamour over Zoom. “That was probably the only time I thought this might not work out.”
Fans might find that hard to believe, having watched the couple clash over everything from Marissa’s military service to Ramses’ distain for condoms during their time outside the pods. However, the 32-year-old law school graduate didn’t view those conversations through a TV screen like the rest of us. Well, at least not at first.
“Looking back a year later, where I’m in a different headspace, I was trying to make a lot of concessions,” Marissa admits. “I wanted to be with him, and I wanted it to work so bad that I was willing to be like, ‘Okay, you’re making me feel bad about my career but we can get past that.’ And now I’m like, Dude, no.”
Ahead of the reunion, Marissa caught Glamour up on all the important details viewers missed before the cameras started rolling—and what went down after they stopped.
Glamour: At a few points this season, we missed the beginnings of certain conversations between you and Ramses. Can we start with the breakfast talk about intimacy?
Marissa George: Ramses and I, obviously, were a very physical couple. And not just in a sexual manner, but also affection and touching. That week we just had a lot going on. The night before that morning, I believe, we didn’t have any intercourse at all and we didn’t even, like, sleep cuddled up like we usually do, and so it felt a little weird. So when we woke up, I just said, “Hey, what’s going on? I could tell you’re having anxiety about some stuff.” Because he’s very obvious. I can read him pretty well. And he had mentioned, well, “I just feel like I’m just nervous about our physical intimacy.” And I was like, Okay, what the hell?
So I instantly got annoyed because we are still getting to know each other and I don’t feel good. I have an autoimmune disease. I have rheumatoid arthritis, so I tend to get sick and my body hurts and I don’t want to be touched. And there’s been a few times before that where he’s petting me and I’m overstimulated. I have ADHD. I get overstimulated physically and I’m like, “You can touch me, just don’t rub me in that moment.”
So he brings all that up, and then we start filming right after that. At that point, I go to the balcony to get some air. I get really sensitive about my autoimmune disease, and I’m like, “Is he not going to want to be with me if I’m chronically ill?”
That hug felt a bit uncomfortable to me. Did it feel like your boundaries were respected while watching that conversation back?
In the moment, I didn’t feel like they weren’t being respected. As an adult, I’m learning more about my boundaries and what that looks like. I didn’t really have a lot of physical or emotional boundaries growing up in our household, so I think that in that moment, I didn’t really want to be touched. It’s very apparent because when I get really upset and I’m really thinking, I’m kind of like, let me be.
But I also understood why he tried to touch me, because we were such a biblically affectionate couple. So he wanted to try to make me feel better. It just wasn’t the right time. Clearly, I just was so annoyed and, honestly, stressed out. This guy says he loves me but now, all of a sudden, I’m worried I’m not enough for him in this aspect of our relationship.
I was particularly happy you brought up the statistics about men leaving their wives when they get sick. In life, you’re not going to be having sex all the time like maybe you would in your 20s.
My mom and other mothers I’ve met and other wives, it seems like sexual intercourse is such a chore for them because it’s when the guy wants it, and I just fear that and I don’t want that. So when Ramses is bringing this stuff up to me, that’s where I’m thinking, “Oh my God. How’s he going to deal with the fact that I’m gonna flare up and I can’t hold up a piece of paper? How’s he gonna deal with when I can’t have sex, or I’m PMSing, or I have a child and I’m postpartum?”
It’s real questions like that—and we had talked about this in the pods as well. So it’s just kind of a reiteration of it.
I don’t think we saw that conversation in the pods. What did you two discuss?
In the pods, I told him that I’m chronically ill, and that’s something that I am sensitive about, and that makes me feel like someone’s not going to want to be with me. There was a great conversation.
He had asked me, “How can I show up for you? How can I show up for you and help you in those moments?” And I said, “Honestly, it’s just, like, being understanding that sometimes I’m not gonna be able to perform at a hundred percent, and just you being understanding and helping me in those times.”
And what was his response to that?
He said he was totally okay [with it]. A lot of the conversations you see outside the pods in the real world are conversations we kind of already had in the pods. But they obviously needed to be brought up again, because they weren’t matching what he was saying, right?
It’s not like he was pressuring me to have sex with him, but I was so mad because it’s just the least of our worries. I was like, we have sex every day, multiple times. Like, I don’t know why we’re bringing this up right now.
It did feel like he was very fixated on sex.
Similar to this conversation, we were kind of dropped right into your breakup scene. Can you explain what went on before the cameras were rolling?
Two days before that, he had talked to a close family friend who used to be close to his ex-wife. And I come home from school one night, and he’s very upset and emotional about his ex-wife. He’s crying, and I’m like, “What’s going on, baby?” And he’s like, “I didn’t realize how much I hurt my ex-wife.” I remember looking at him and thinking, This is somehow going to fuck us up. That was probably the only time I thought this might not work out.
So the next day, he’s just in a different mood. He is not this chatty, lovey guy. I didn’t have class that day, so we were both at home and we aren’t meshing. He’s not listening to me, he’s not talking to me, and I’m starting to feel ignored, and I started to feel like something’s off.
And then he calls a friend. And the way he describes me to this friend, I’m just like, “Do you even like me?”
What did he say?
His friend’s like, “Oh my God, tell me all about this girl!” I’m sitting right next to him and he’s like, “Oh, she’s just so full of energy…” He made me sound crazy. I literally got up from the conversation. I don’t want to be here if you’re gonna talk about me like that.
Embarrassingly enough, before we even go to bed that night—because I felt like he was ignoring me—I dressed up in lingerie and I tried to clean the house in my lingerie to see if he noticed. He doesn’t notices for over an hour. We go to bed, we don’t even kiss goodnight. The next morning, I wake up, I go to school, I text him, and I say, “I love you. I hope everything’s okay. We should talk.” And he’s like, “Yeah, I’ve been having some doubts. We should talk.
I called him while I was in class—this is around 11:00 a.m.—and he’s on the phone just saying, “I don’t know. I’m starting to feel doubts.” And he just starts crying. I leave class, I drive an hour and a half back to DC and that’s where you guys kind of see us talking. He’s crying, I’m crying, and it went on like that for the entire day until I want to say, like, 1:00 in the morning.
It felt like such a gut-wrenching split. Watching you sobbing was such a stark contrast to the other breakups we’d witnessed this season.
I think with the other couples, the difference was none of us saw this breakup coming. It wasn’t like me and him were having big fights. The military conversations and the sex and all that, those were discussions you just need to keep having as a couple. And I didn’t think they were game changers at the time. I asked him so many times, “Are you sure?” And it wasn’t because I wasn’t sure. It was because everything was just going so good.
He would always say, “One hundred percent. Love of my life. Soul mate. Gonna marry you.” I take people at face value, and Ramses never led me to believe I shouldn’t believe what is coming out of his mouth. And so when he says we should break up and I don’t want to date you…
Wait, what?
I offered to not get married. We can stay engaged, or we can do everything on our own timeline. We don’t have to move in immediately. That was never the plan anyway. We don’t have to be engaged to date. It was a hard no.
And that is what really tore me up. I’m a very smart person. I’ve spent a lot of years in therapy and really know what I want. And it really turned me upside down, like it made me really question everything I’ve ever believed in.
I know you haven’t seen the episode yet, but that’s not in it. You asked to continue dating outside of the show and he said no?
Absolutely. He said no, absolutely not.
Did he give an explanation?
Throughout the whole breakup—which made it worse—he couldn’t really give me a reason. To this day, I don’t know if he really has a good reason. I think he has tried to pinpoint certain things, like that I listened to podcasts in the morning and I sing in the shower type of stuff.…But at the time of the breakup, he was just like, “I don’t feel at peace anymore, and I feel like our energies off and I’m gonna hurt you in five years, but I love you and want to be with you, but this is moving too fast.”
And I’m like, “Okay, well, let’s just not move fast. You stay in DC, I stay in Baltimore. But stay together.” And he was like, “No.” And that’s a very hard thing to grasp: How do you supposedly love this person so so much, and they don’t even want to be with you? Then I’m thinking, it’s me, because he’s saying it’s my energy.
I was surprised by how many times he talked about your energy because up until that point it felt like the problem was that your priorities and values weren’t aligned.
He will tell you those issues did not play a role in why he didn’t want to be together. It was about my energy. In the pods, I told him that with my ADHD, being in an environment where you’re filming and there’s lights and cameras, it overstimulates me and maybe makes me a little bit more hyper than usual. But I didn’t feel like we ever had the time to get there, because he was just like, “No, you’re too much.” It’s not like I’m at home bouncing off the walls!
Like, if you don’t want me to talk during a Netflix show, that’s a preference. That’s stuff that you, like, work on as a couple, but like, he just didn’t want to, he gave up.
You’ve said you felt blindsided in that moment, but do you still feel that way as you’ve watched the season unfold?
I see him being overwhelmed by me in a way that I didn’t see in person. So I think I’m less blindsided in that sense. But otherwise, no, because those conversations never felt like the end of us. They just felt like, you have your opinion about this, I have my opinion about this.
Looking back a year later, where I’m in a different space in my life and headspace, I was trying to make a lot of concessions. I wanted to be with him, and I wanted it to work so bad that I was willing to be like, “Okay, you’re making me feel bad about my career but we can get past that.” And now I’m like, Dude, no.
Do you think he’s the feminist he thinks he is?
I don’t know…I don’t think he’s as feminist as he thinks he is, no. Because I think he is a lot more selfish than he realizes and I just don’t think he’s aware of it.
I think he is a good person. I just don’t think he realizes how he comes across. He’s like, “I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t really care,” because no matter how feminist a man is going to be, he’s still going to have a blind spot because he’s a man at the end of the day.
He did seem to talk down to you throughout the season.
Yeah, I agree with that perspective. As I watch it, I’m like, God, Marissa, he’s not listening to anything you’re saying. He’s like, “No one put a gun to your head when you joined [the military],” and I was like, “Did you not hear anything I just said?”
There is a moral superiority that comes into play in our conversations, where it’s like, okay, I don’t have a degree, I don’t have this, I don’t have that, but I am more progressive than you, and I care more about the world than you, so therefore I’m gonna say it in small ways to make you feel that way. At the time, I didn’t really notice it, but I see it now. And I already have my sister being my progressive awakening. I don’t need yours.
Can we talk about your mom for a second? What do you have to say about your relationship?
First off, she needs therapy, as I said on camera. I think my mom and I have a very interesting relationship, because she was 17 or 18 when she had me. I know from therapy that a lot of my people-pleasing tendencies come from my mom trying to mold me to not fall on the same path as her.
I think people just need to be a little bit more kind. Being a parent is hard and she’s not perfect, and she has a lot of work to do on herself. But that doesn’t mean she freaking hates her children because she called me a bitch on TV. It’s crazy, people are like, “Oh my God, I would never call someone out of their name.” We all have, come on.
The internet also had a lot to say about her interactions with Ramses—
I told her not to talk about that man’s looks.
But for all the critics, there were some viewers that got the impression she was sensing BS from Ramses. Did she say anything to you after that meetup?
Yes, she did. She felt that he was very different from who I’ve dated before and she felt like ultimately, he would never be able to keep up with my lifestyle because he didn’t have a degree. She puts a lot of emphasis…I mean, that’s that generation, right? Go to school, get a degree. And she said that she felt like he had a superiority complex. She tried to give him a chance. She had been nice to him off camera, but once they had the conversation surrounding his ex-wife, they don’t show it but she literally cuts him off and says, “I’m done listening to what you have to say.”
The way he talked about [his divorce] was very much like, “I did this for her. I want to her to be happy.” And my mom’s like, “Don’t explain marriage or divorce to me.” That came across harsh. She’s just trying to say he was talking down to her. And she’s saying, I’m done with this conversation, you’re trying make yourself sound like a saint.
So she kind of saw through that, and she also saw that I would have to carry him in the relationship. She was like, “You’re gonna have to carry that man emotionally. You’re gonna have to take care of him.” And I saw that.
He sort of said that to you during the breakup—that he didn’t want to hurt you down the line.
Exactly. You know, I recognized that during the breakup. I was like, “You know, Rams, your ex-wife is getting married this month.” She was getting married the same month as us, ironically. And I said, “She’s getting married. She’s moved on. You guys were young. You’re not the same person you were when you were 25 when you married her, and when you guys got divorced years later.”
I think for him, he knew he couldn’t keep up, and he thought he wasn’t good enough. And the sad part is that a lot of my love for him, to this day, is unconditional. Him not being with me does not change how I feel about him. Him breaking my heart does not change the love that I have for him. But for him, our love was very conditional on a lot of things, and he was scared to hurt me.
So you think that’s genuine? You think he really was worried about hurting you and that wasn’t just what he said to mask other issues?
Yeah, I do. I go back and forth. Honestly, sometimes I’m like, “Did he know this whole time he wasn’t gonna marry me? He just did it for the show?” Yeah, that’s obviously crossed my mind.
I don’t know. I think, honestly, for my own mental health, I’ve had to believe it had to be somewhat real, because I think it would just have hurt too much at the time to think it wasn’t.
Are you ready to see him again at the reunion?
I think it’ll be very difficult to see him but I think I’ll make it through. I think it will be emotional, because I still have a lot of love for him. I don’t think he has a lot of maliciousness in him. I just think he is flawed and has a lot of stuff he needs to work through and he refuses to go to therapy, so… [Laughs] Until he does, he’s not going to become as self-aware as he needs to be to truly grow.
Have you seen each other since the breakup?
We saw each other a few times after. I took the breakup really hard, as you can imagine from the scene of me crying and stuff. It took me probably six months to get back on track and to really start to move on. So I saw him a few times when I was in DC, and there was one time where we talked one day for like, eight and a half, nine hours on the phone, and I thought we were gonna get back together after that.
So like, February or March, I did ask him if he wanted to get back together. I’m not really ashamed to say that, because I’m someone who’s like, if you feel it, you feel it, like, what’s the worst that can happen? And he’s like, “Nah.” So after that, we just stopped communication.
Do you have anything you want people to know about you and Ramses?
I would say to remember that while what you’re seeing is what happened in our conversations, there’s a lot more nuance to it, and he’s not this horrible, evil person who was trying to oppress me. He just really wasn’t. And me and him now do communicate and have a fairly decent…I wouldn’t call it friendship, but we can have a conversation. He is not this horrible person that everyone thinks he is. I just think he has a lot of stuff he needs to work on, and until he goes to therapy, he will continue to struggle with who he is as a person.
So yeah, people, we need to be a little nicer. I didn’t fall in love with a horrible person.
