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For The Record“I just knew right away that we weren’t going to Mexico.”
Despite ultimately getting engaged, their time in the experiment runs out — something even Leo’s beloved Rolex can’t account for. With a surplus of love stories to choose from this season — six other couples jet off to a romantic retreat in Mexico for the next phase of the journey — the cameras don’t follow Brittany and Leo post-proposal. Instead, we learn that while they continued to explore their relationship outside the pods, the pair decided to go their separate ways.
So what happened off-screen? Keep reading to hear from Brittany and Leo to find out more about their connection in the pods and their reaction to not being chosen as one of this season’s final couples.
From the earliest days in the pods, Brittany was sure of one thing: “I knew it was Leo.” While she was also intrigued by both Bohdan and Stephen, there was something that kept her coming back to the art dealer with the soothing voice.
“I’m either attracted to the craziest rock star jackass kind of character or the most clean-cut businessman — and there’s no in between,” Brittany tells Tudum. Leo, naturally, fell into the latter category. “The energy just shifted when I was on a date with him,” she adds. “He immediately felt very comforting to me.”
“Brittany was kind of like opposites attract for me,” Leo says about his first impression. On every other date, he’d been furiously taking notes to keep track of the various conversations, but Brittany challenged his “meticulous, type A” approach to dating. “She was like, ‘Should we just throw [the notebooks] out?’ We did, and in that moment I felt this relaxation. It was just super easy between us.” And while the two come from entirely different worlds, they had much more in common than either ever expected. “We had a lot of similar things happen to us, being only children and our moms both dying of cancer,” says Leo. “But we also were super intentional about not trauma-bonding. We’ve had a bunch of sad stuff happen to us, but that’s not going to be [our] foundation.” Brittany was surprised how quickly she opened up in their conversations. “We talked on a deeper level than I have with every other man combined,” she recalls. “That’s my favorite quality [about him]. It just wasn’t about the shallow stuff.”
But Leo was also pursuing a relationship with Hannah, who he genuinely believed was his “twin flame.” Torn between two very different women, Leo struggled to make a decision until the final days of the pods. “Hannah felt like the girl version of myself,” he says. “We understood each other, and I felt like I could complete her sentences.” But unlike his conversations with Brittany, his dates with Hannah felt comparatively shallow. “We would have so much fun together but never got super deep,” he says. “I’ve never been so torn in a decision in my life.”
Heading into what would be an explosive date with Hannah, Leo was intent on breaking down his walls. “I went in ready to be vulnerable,” he says. So when Hannah let him know that she’d already committed to her other connection, Nick D., the emotions just came pouring out. “I was totally raw, and that contributed a lot to how I reacted,” Leo admits. “That was where a lot of the anger came from. When you’re not vulnerable a lot, and it doesn’t go your way, you don’t necessarily act in the most mature [way].”
All the back and forth was hardly Brittany’s vision for her ideal courtship. “I was surprised that he had another connection, because I felt so strongly,” she remembers. “When I found out he was asking us both our ring sizes, I was very just taken aback.” But Leo forged ahead once he and Hannah agreed that they weren’t the best fit. Declaring his love for Brittany in a rhyming proposal poem (“I remember our first date clear as day / We were spot No. 4 / I love your voice and every word you say / I found my queen from Baltimore”), Leo pulled out all the stops to make sure their journey wasn’t over just yet.
“Things were rocky,” he says. “There’s no way that Brittany was not going to feel like a second choice. I was really fighting to show that I wanted her.” His overtures were compelling enough for Brittany to accept his proposal — with the caveat that she wasn’t ready to say “I love you” back.
And then came the reveal. For Leo, it was his chance for a real proposal. But once the doors opened and the couple met for the first time, he sensed something was off. “I remember I saw her, and she’s super beautiful,” he recalls. “But I could tell when she looked at me that I wasn’t quite her type. It’s totally fine, but I could just tell.” Brittany, however, maintains that absolutely nothing about Leo’s appearance unsettled her. “I knew exactly what he [would] look like,” she says. Instead, she says it was a shift in energy between them that caught her off guard. “It was the most awkward moment of my life,” she says. “I was surprised, because I’m very intuitive. I could talk to [him] behind the wall and have this emotional and intellectual connection, but in person, I was like, ‘Oh, fuck. This is not my husband.’ He was proposing [again], and I was like, ‘This is not right.’ ”
Still, Brittany accepted Leo’s second proposal, as the feelings she had developed for him in the pods — albeit less romantic than she had anticipated — were real. “He was so comforting, especially in that crazy moment,” she says. “We really just leaned into each other. But yeah, you can’t predict physical chemistry through a wall. You just can’t.”
So what happened next? Leo knew their reveal hadn’t gone smoothly, but he was confident that they’d have the opportunity to adjust in Mexico along with the other couples. “I thought I was going. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I’m a shoo-in, because I was in a love triangle,’ ” he says. “I also knew that I liked Brittany more than she liked me, especially in the reveal, so I felt that it would be a chance to explore that further.” But after consulting with producers, he was informed that his Love Is Blind journey had come to an end. “I felt crushed,” he says. Brittany, meanwhile, knew they wouldn’t jet off to the romantic retreat once the cameras went down. “I just knew right away that we weren’t going to Mexico because we were the weakest couple,” she says. “I didn’t process it at first, but then I just cried. It was very overwhelming, because I felt so strongly about him.”
But that’s not where their story ended. In the aftermath of the reveal, Brittany and Leo tried to figure out sans cameras if the magic in the pods was really gone for good. “The first couple of days were electric,” Leo says about spending time with Brittany away from the experiment.
“We would still have these long, deep talks about spirituality,” she recalls. “But ultimately [he] was just like a friend. We’d go to bed together, and I’m like, ‘Nothing here.’ ”
That’s when they mutually agreed to go their separate ways after things “fizzled out” between them. But after thoroughly exploring their connection, the two walked away from the experience with zero regrets and, unexpectedly, a friendship. “This could have gone so badly, but it didn’t,” Brittany says, reflecting on how their relationship ended. “I really think that he’s a friend for life.”
As for Leo, the experience — no matter how unconventional, even by Love Is Blind standards — was worth the risk. “I’d never shown so much emotion in such a short amount of time, so it was really scary,” he says. “While it also opened up myself to being hurt, I realized that going forward, that’s the only way I’ll truly find someone that I’m meant to be with for the rest of my life.”
Curious about how the other couples are faring as the rest of the season unfolds? Check out our status update each week to see who’s still together and who makes it to the altar.
