Love Is Blind’s Stacy on Izzy’s ‘Big Misconception’ — and Why His Wedding Rant ‘Surprised’ Her

Stacy Snyder is sharing her perspective about her time on Love Is Blind, which ended with a broken engagement to Izzy Zapata.

Friday’s season 5 finale brought an end to Stacy and Izzy’s love story as the two reached the altar but decided to go their separate ways. Though Izzy said yes to marrying Stacy, she ultimately turned him down, citing lack of time as their biggest issue.

Later, after the two seemingly came to an understanding and shared a kiss at the altar, Izzy slammed Stacy to producers once he had a moment to register his emotions.

“It’s like she’s always trying to find something wrong,” he said in a confessional interview. “It’s like all the outside s— was getting to her, and I blocked out everything. Looks, money, drama. I just focused on her …. The whole point of this [experiment] is, Does it matter? Does a credit score matter? Does the car I drive matter? Does where I go to f—ing dinner matter? None of that matters to me. It makes me wonder, ‘Why are you 33 and single and not married?’ I’m 29 years old and I can give you everything that a f—ing rich, 45-year-old man that you always go for and always fail with can’t give you.”

Reacting to her ex-fiancé’s heated rant, Stacy, now 34, tells PEOPLE she “was so surprised” to hear Izzy’s words — but doesn’t blame him entirely.

“We were probably up all night the last night or two before the wedding after that financial conversation where we both felt like things were falling apart. So we were both a wreck,” she reveals. “I’m talking, crying on the phone for hours, trying to talk it through, panic. ‘What do we do?’ And then we just agreed, ‘We’ve been a team this full time. We’re going to go into this thing as a team and we’re going to finish as a team. We’re not throwing each other under the bus…. We have nothing left.'”

She continues, “We were so emotionally drained that we both have to stand up there together to get through this. And we did. So the switch that flipped from there to the very end, when we talked about it, he said that it was his final interview that put him into that position…. It’s the questions of, ‘Do you not feel enough?’ ‘Why doesn’t she want you?’ All these things that no one wants to hear after the closest thing to a breakup.”

“Of course he’s going to be emotional,” she acknowledges. “Did I like what he said? No, but I know why he said it. He was hurt. I know him and I know he was hurt. I don’t believe the things that he said. I don’t think he believes the things that he said. And I think he was genuinely just hurt.”

It was no surprise that Izzy, now 31, was heartbroken after the two had gone through so much on Love Is Blind. Earlier in their journey, the two faced challenges when Izzy was introduced to Stacy’s life in Houston. She began to criticize the way he lived, including his “messy” apartment, “lost and found” drawer of random women’s possessions and his use of paper plates.

Stacy was also extremely concerned about Izzy’s finances and poor credit — particularly because the director of operations was accustomed to living a lavish lifestyle (as her dad put it, “sometimes love wants to fly first class”).

On their wedding day, Stacy told Izzy before rejecting him at the altar, “I do want you, and I want to say yes. But I would be doing you and I a disservice right now to say that ‘I do’ when I feel like there’s a lot things we need — and more than anything, we need time.”

Addressing her reasoning further, Stacy tells PEOPLE: “I think that we were both ready for marriage, and I think that we saw marriage differently…. The difference between relationships and marriages is you’re binding everything together. That’s serious. You need to know everything, the not-so-fun topics.”

“I think that Izzy saw it much more romantic where it’s like, ‘If you’re in love, you say yes,’ and I want to feel that way as well,” she continues. “But I know that the number one reason for divorce is finances. So I would love to run away and do that whole fairy tale … but if you don’t look at money the same way, that’s also an issue.”

Emphasizing how they were on “a time crunch and every little thing that comes up that’s not a big deal is a huge deal because you don’t have time to figure it out,” Stacy reiterates that she had to make the best decision for her.

“I don’t want to have a divorce,” she says. “I don’t want to go through that.”

It also didn’t help that right before their wedding, Izzy and Stacy had a conversation about Izzy’s poor credit score. Stacy struggled with the revelation, claiming Izzy was not entirely truthful and had intentionally not brought it up earlier when he had the chance.

Despite those feelings, Stacy insists that there was much more at play when that conversation happened — and it wasn’t all to blame for why she said no at the altar.

“It played a big role, but it wasn’t just the credit that was news to me,” she explains. “He had a new job and couldn’t exactly explain the pay structure of that. He couldn’t really give me a roundabout number as far as what he could expect to make, whether it was low or high. He didn’t get insurance or benefits with that job. All I’m hearing and seeing is [that] ‘I am responsible for us if something bad happens.'”

She says, “I think in a marriage you need to think ahead. If a tornado were to hit, what will we do with our house? What are you going to do with kids if you have a child that has disabilities or special needs? These are all the things that you need to think about, where I just felt like he was so in the moment with it. And that’s the difference between how we saw marriage…. So I felt very alone and scared because I know if it all fell on me, I do OK on my own, but I don’t do OK enough to support two people.”

Stacy also sets the record straight about the “misconceptions” circling about her — both from Izzy and the internet — that she wants a “sugar daddy.”

“I don’t want a man to support me, never want a man to support me,” she says. “But I also don’t want to support a man. I want both of us to bring something to the table. That’s a big misconception with people saying, ‘She wants a sugar daddy or someone to support her.’ I’m like, ‘I have never wanted that. And that is the exact opposite way of which I was raised,’ so let’s clear that up!”