Warning: Spoilers for Love Is Blind season 8, episodes 1—12, ahead.
After 11 long episodes, Lauren O’Brien finally got her hero moment on Love Is Blind. After starting off the season being labeled a “pick me” for the way she handled her love triangle with Molly Mullaney and Dave Bettenburg, she quickly morphed into the woman to root for as Dave stonewalled and borderline slut-shamed her over a pre-show situationship with someone from his social circle.
Throughout the Minneapolis episodes, it was difficult to tell if Dave believed Lauren lied about the nature of the relationship or if he just didn’t like that she slept with someone before knowing the medical sales rep existed. As he continued to question the former teacher’s ability to move on from a hookup, I just kept thinking, “Didn’t we just watch Dave date two women for five pod episodes?” And, of course, “Why is she even fighting for this guy?”
Lauren doesn’t really have an answer for either question. “I know I’m going to have such a tough time watching that because I’m also going to be screaming at myself,” she tells Glamour over Zoom before the latest batch of episode dropped on February 28.
“He kept kind of referencing this idea that because I had this sexual relationship with someone beforehand, that translates to me not being ready for marriage,” she says. “I just didn’t understand how those two things equated, and how that in any way was a reflection on my character or my maturity or my readiness for marriage. So, yeah, I could not really wrap my mind around it.”
Lauren might not have told Dave everything she would’ve said with hindsight, but she did get the final word when Dave tried to retract their breakup during a group outing in episode 11. “I’m sorry you’re, like, going through all the feels of this,” she told him before shutting down his slurred attempt at reconciliation. “I think we’re past that.”
In a new interview with Glamour, Lauren reflected on her entire Love Is Blind experience, the off-camera moments that we didn’t get to see, and why she’d “do it again in a heartbeat.”
Glamour: How are you doing, really?
Lauren O’Brien: Yeah, it’s been a lot. I don’t know. I think the journey, in general, was a roller coaster. There’s been a lot of high highs in all of this. It’s been really fun to have had this experience and share this with my loved ones and friends and family, and it comes with this newfound social media presence that I don’t think I was fully prepared for.
Was there anything you particularly didn’t expect?
I didn’t expect to get such a “pick me” edit and a “pick me” response to me fighting for my relationship with the person that I wanted to be with. So that really surprised me.
The second you used the word “delulu” in regards to Molly, I knew people were going to have strong feelings about it because we, the viewer, saw him tell Molly she was his number one. Of course, you didn’t see that.
We are operating and making really big decisions on the information we have in front of us. I remember hearing these things in the lounge, and I was really torn. Do I want to talk to Molly about this, or do I want to talk to Dave about this? Ultimately, I was like, Dave is the person I’m in a relationship with, and I want to hear from him first. I wasn’t going to avoid Molly, but that’s kind of how I was navigating things.
That’s interesting because we all saw Dave take the opposite approach when it came to your situation outside of the pods.
Absolutely!
He seemed to want to talk to everyone but you.
Correct, yeah. I mean, my opening line—the way that they introduced me—is how I really wanted to find a teammate in this. I felt like I did that for Dave when we were in the pods all the time, and that is how I saw him. Like, we are on a team. Of course, I’m not ignoring other things or not listening to other people, but I was prioritizing him. And I definitely felt like I didn’t get that in return when we came back to Minneapolis.
Before we continue on this path, I wanted to ask about something in the pods. We saw Dave tell Molly about cheating on his prior partner. Did he tell you that?
Not when we were in the pods. We had talked about previous relationships, obviously. It’s funny, because when I did learn about it, I was like, “Did I not explicitly ask him? Was I not clear enough when I was like, ‘Tell me exactly how this relationship ended?’”
How did you react when you did find out?
I actually remember saying out loud, like, “Oh, Dave.” All of this time, I’m gathering information about someone… You’re making these really big decisions based on just what you have in front of you. So there was a moment that I’m like, Okay, I’m still gathering these big pieces of information about him.
In Honduras, Dave kept asking everyone, “Did you have sex yet? Did you have sex yet?” Was that a bad edit or was he particularly fixated on that aspect of your relationship?
We were encouraged to talk about it. The whole point of this part of the experiment was like, are you connecting physically? And so it was a little bit like, “Okay, see how this is for other people too.”
Can you give us a bit of a timeline of events when you got back to Minneapolis?
We got our phones back in the Honduras airport—and there was almost a lot of foreshadowing off camera, with Dave being like, “I just don’t want to get my phone back. I don’t want to hear from everyone. I just want to stay in this bubble…” So we got our phones back, and I immediately felt a shift from him. It is almost like his walls physically went back up, and I could feel that from him sitting at the airport, sitting on the plane, and being in the Minneapolis Airport.
I’m calling my family and friends and excited to share things with them. And he is opening up his group chat—he showed me at one point it was uploading so much that it looked like his phone was glitching with how much his group chat was going off. I found out later that it was them basically telling him, “You just got engaged to someone with a boyfriend.”
And so he’s sitting there in the airport soaking up all this information, not telling me and any of that. He just said, like, “My sister had already heard through the grapevine who it was that I got engaged to, and she just didn’t think that I would get this far.” So that’s all happening. We get back to Minneapolis, we get in the bus to go to our new shared apartment, and someone else on the cast is like, “Guys, I heard through the grapevine…” Again, Minneapolis is so small—
As we’re learning!
As we’re learning! So he was like, ”I heard through the grapevine that we’re staying at 365 Apartments.”
I immediately turned to Dave, and I said, “Do you know who lives in 365 apartments?” It’s this other guy that we had already established on the getaways was like a mutual friend with him. So that’s kind of the first 24 hours of getting back.
Like I said, I could just feel this pull away from him for those first four or five days. We’re still kind of doing things here and there, but he wasn’t really trying to talk to me about this a ton off camera either. We’re having these conversations but not really getting to the nitty gritty of things. And then the cameras would roll, and he’d be like, “So you have this boyfriend?” And I’m like, “Okay, we couldn’t have talked about any of this like an hour ago when cameras weren’t here?”
It sounded like he stopped staying at the apartment before the night his friends were supposed to come meet you. When did that start?
The night that his friends were supposed to come over and then didn’t was the only night he didn’t come back to the apartment. We’re obviously both working during this time, but we had spent evenings together. We were kind of in and out of the apartments and this shared workspace, but toward the end, he was going back to his apartment during the day to work. I remember being like, “You don’t need to do that. We have plenty of space.”
What was going through your head during that discussion?
Number one at the time, I’m navigating this with someone that I thought was my teammate, so I was navigating with a lot more grace that I obviously would have if I knew, looking back, how he was actually thinking about things. But I also didn’t get it. He kept kind of referencing this idea that because I had this sexual relationship with someone beforehand, that translates to me not being ready for marriage. I just didn’t understand how those two things equated and how that in any way was a reflection on my character or my maturity or my readiness for marriage. So, yeah, I just could not really wrap my mind around it.
Based on what was shown to us, there never seemed to be a really peaceful moment in your relationship after coming home. What made you want to fight so hard to keep it going at that point? Was there something viewers missed?
No, that’s a really good question. I definitely felt that too when we were back in Minneapolis. So we’re filming like five nights a week, and we have like, a couple nights off. Halfway through the first week we were in Minneapolis, we had a night off, and he was like, “I really need to go have dinner at my sister’s house.” And I was like, “I need to talk to my family.” But we were like, “Let’s go do something together just us for a couple of hours and reset a little bit.”
And so we went to a brewery and hung out for a couple of hours and played cards, and I remember just feeling very, very connected to him and thinking, “Okay, this is what our life could look like.”
He dropped me off that night—and it was like, so quick—and he was just like, “Okay, love you, bye. I’ll see you soon.” I remember feeling like it was so genuine, and it brought me back to feeling this very personal, close relationship. It was just a very real moment, and we hadn’t had that in over a week since Honduras, so that was a moment that I think I held on to.
So, we know the guy you were casually seeing before coming on the show lived in the building—did you ever run into him?
I saw him by the elevators.
Did he say anything?
He wanted to talk, and I remember him asking me, “Do you love this guy? Do you love him?” And I’m standing there wearing an engagement ring like, “Yes.”
Did he have any reason to believe your relationship was more serious than you did? Or do you think there was there a more nefarious reason he was telling people you were together?
I think it was more nefarious than I thought at the time.
In what way?
Just based on conversations that we had had in the past, there was nothing that would have ever indicated that when we got back he would need to insert himself into Dave and I’s story, so I was just kind of confused by the approach that he took to get involved in something that I just didn’t think there was a place for him in.
Can you tell me a bit more about Dave’s conversation with your dad?
Yeah, so we actually had a couple conversations with my dad. The first one went really well, and my dad just had a lot of questions for Dave about who he was and how he was thinking about things and that. The second one was after my dad took some time to think about it, and really just wanted to make sure Dave was ready. I think he gave the advice that every parent would give a child who was about to get married—whether it’s on Love Is Blind or not—to make sure that this is what you want, make sure that you’re ready to be here, and make sure that this is right. And he said it in a way that wasn’t a light tone, and I think Dave sensed the gravity of everything.
It was so great seeing you coming together with Molly after the breakup. Did she tell you what she told Dave after your chat?
A little bit… She just kind of told me that she had stood up for me, which didn’t surprise me at all. She’s always been a girl’s girl like that.
What was going through your head when Dave attempted to rekindle the relationship at the group outing?
I was just very defeated. I just didn’t understand it. It felt very disingenuous. I didn’t understand how he could have made a complete 180 in the 24 hours since we’d seen each other. And I was so emotionally exhausted trying to navigate this relationship by myself for a week and to now have him present in a way like he’s ready to tackle it, I just was so defeated. I didn’t believe that that was actually something that he was capable of doing.
Regardless of Dave, it’s been uplifting to see your friendships with the rest of the girls continue since filming. I’ve seen a bunch of your TikTok videos together, so it seems like something positive came out of this experience for you.
Exactly. I would do it again in a heartbeat, and break my heart again a million times to have the girls out of this that I got.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Episodes 1—12 of Love Is Blind season 8 are currently streaming on Netflix.
Taylor discusses how social media affected everyone in season eight, including that “shocking” TikTok video about Ben.
The post Love Is Blind’s Lauren on Dave’s Attempt to Get Her Back: ‘It Felt Very Disingenuous’ appeared first on Glamour.
