Giannina Gibelli is happy with where she is in life now. The Love Is Blind season 1 alum has been in a committed relationship with Bachelor Nation alum Blake Horstmann for more than a year and a half, but back when her season of the Netflix reality series came out, she was struggling in her toxic relationship with Damian Powers.
Giannina popped the question to Damian in the pods and the pair went back and forth throughout their romance all the way up to the altar. Damian rejected Giannina at the altar, and though she ran from the altar in tears, the exes ended up reconnecting in the time after their season filmed.
The reality star joined fellow Love Is Blind alums Deepti Vempati and Natalie Lee on their Out of the Pods podcast, where she opened up about her chaotic relationship with Damian and how she felt he “humiliated” her on the After the Altar special.
“That was a very, very real reflection of how we were,” Giannina said of their dramatic romance. Noting that before After the Altar filmed, “We had been on and off the whole time.”
Describing the exes as “each other’s pillars” in the post-show time period, Giannina explained of their on-again, off-again romance, “We just never met eye to eye on a lot of things, but I trusted him. Even though my trust was betrayed over and over again. I would get DMs all the time.”
During After the Altar, Damian shocked Giannina and viewers alike when he engaged in a flirty friendship with fellow Netflix star Francesca Farago, inviting her to an on-camera cast event where Giannina was present.
“After the Altar happened and the entire time Damian was reassuring me, ‘There’s nothing going on between us.’ Then a year later, I see the whole thing and I just felt like a f**king idiot,” she explained. “I don’t care how much producers tell you to do something, they can’t edit words into your mouth and also you do everything you want.”
Giannina claimed that Damian was “baiting” her by bringing Francesca to the event, even offering her glasses of water that she thinks he wanted her to throw in his face.
“That night I officially broke up with him. That night I felt nothing and I was free,” she said of the failed romance. “It was like, humiliate me once, shame on you, humiliate me twice, shame on me. Humiliate me three f**king times at this point, I’m done.”
As for her current attitude toward Damian, Giannina says, “I wish him well.”
The reality star met her current boyfriend, Blake, on All Star Shore, not thinking that she would be getting into a long-term romance. But Blake asked her to be his girlfriend on the show and she had a choice to make.
She was signed up to join the cast of Perfect Match, another Netflix spinoff that both Damian and Francesca were on, but she couldn’t go on the dating show while in a relationship.
“It was either I go with this love that I’ve found, or I go to prove something to myself and try to get my clout, not gonna lie. I didn’t think the clout was worth it. I felt like Blake was worth it,” she said of her decision to choose her relationship.
As for her current man, he was a runner-up on season 14 of The Bachelorette, where he proposed to Becca Kufrin. He also appeared on Bachelor in Paradise. Giannina said that while she used to get regular DMs from people claiming Damian was cheating on her, she’s never gotten the same from anyone about Blake.
“Blake is a DJ. Blake goes and DJs all over and I never have once gotten a DM and I’m still in a public relationship,” she said of her man.
All seasons of Love Is Blind are currently streaming on Netflix.
