Love Is Blind fans are screaming “justice for Lauren” at their TVs — and season 8 star Lauren O’Brien has heard the calls.
“I’ve said multiple times I’m too boring for reality TV,” the 31-year-old former teacher told Us Weekly in an exclusive interview with a laugh. “Dave and I’s story is very relatable — a lot of women probably see themselves in this situation, being like, ‘I dated someone that didn’t believe me or listened to noise or shamed me for having a sexual relationship before this.’ I think that there are a lot of women that see themselves in that scenario.”
On the current season of the Netflix reality show, Lauren got engaged to Dave Bettenburg, a 33-year-old who works in medical sales, in the pods.
“The pods is definitely one of those experiences that unless you go through it yourself, it actually doesn’t make any sense,” Lauren explained. “I remember thinking, ‘How am I going to explain to my friends and family that I got to an emotionally strong enough place to be engaged to someone from this? … How am I gonna word it?’ But Dave and I’s connection felt very easy in the pods.”
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The twosome “had a lot of serious, difficult conversations” while also managing to have “a lot of fun together.”
“There’s different conversations that we were encouraged to have and think about because it’s like, ‘OK, this is the person that you’re gonna marry. You should have some of these bigger conversations that you wouldn’t have on date three in the real world.’ And it just felt like we were very aligned in a lot of different ways,” she continued. “Not only our past and how we grew up and how we kind of came to be the people that we are, but then what we want our futures to look like. It felt very in sync. I felt very ready to do the next step with him by the time we got engaged.”
The main roadblock that viewers saw for Lauren and Dave was his connection with Molly Mullaney. According to Lauren, however, the “Molly stuff” wasn’t as big of a deal as it seemed.
“I was also having other connections. It’s so funny to look back because I was talking to Mason up until almost the end. And then after I realized that he had this whole thing with Meg and Madison and I was like, ‘Wait, what? We’ve been talking every day,’” she revealed. “It is so funny to watch that back and just not have seen any of that. But I think it’s a testament to [how] I was so wrapped up in my own s—. Like, I was having these conversations with the guys and, of course, you’re spending time in the lounge, but so much of my head space was being taken up about these romantic relationships.”
Lauren did recall Molly telling her that Dave was her “No. 1” around three or four days into the pods.
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“I remember being like, ‘I really liked Dave, but he was not my only guy.’ He wasn’t even my No. 1 at that point. So it really didn’t click for me until toward the end,” she explained, noting that things shifted a bit when she heard from Molly that Dave was calling her his No. 1 too. “We’re allowed to have multiple connections, [but] you telling someone a ranking, like, what is the purpose of me being here? Like, I can go, please let me be free. It was interesting to look back and [see] I was kind of clueless to he and Molly’s connection — I wasn’t sitting there comparing the two of our connections. I didn’t really have the time or mental capacity to do that, but you do see me grappling with it. That was a tough 24 hours because I had to hear that from Molly and then Dave and I didn’t have a date until the next day. And I remember really being torn on like, ‘Do I talk to Molly about this? What’s the best approach?’”
Lauren and Molly did end up talking, and formed a friendship, but she put her relationship with Dave first. “I was internally struggling and I remember thinking, ‘Dave is the person that I am in this with, so he’s the one that I owe this conversation to,” she said.
From there, the five engaged couples headed to Honduras. And while viewers have cringed at Dave’s apparent fixation on asking which duos whether they’ve had sex, Lauren actually liked how Dave “spoke his mind,” revealing she even told her male costars, “I’m never questioning where his head is at.”
It wasn’t smooth sailing for long as things took a turn when they got their phones back and Dave started receiving messages from friends about Lauren’s pre-show hookup.
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“He got those messages, like, right away, but he didn’t really tell me that that was such a strong voice in these group chats and in those conversations until like a couple days after we got back,” she told Us. “I didn’t know that that’s what he was internally struggling with in the beginning.”
It was quickly clear, however, that Dave was fixated on the situation.
“I wouldn’t even consider it a situationship because if it were a situationship, it would be like, ‘Oh, do we wanna be together or not be together?’ And like we weren’t having those conversations,” Lauren explained to Us of the now-infamous. “other guy.” She continued: “He knew that I was having conversations with casting the entire time that we were talking. And I remember him saying, ‘We don’t need to take this very seriously.’ We were friends with benefits.”
As she was having these conversations with Dave, Lauren knew it was going to be brutal to relive when the show eventually aired.
“My Nonna watches this show. Like, my entire sexual history is gonna be aired for national television — that’s embarrassing for me,” she said. “That was a whole other thing that I wasn’t fully prepared to do.”
While the series still has several episodes to go, fans have been largely on her side — something Lauren didn’t predict.
“I genuinely was so torn on who was in the right. I knew my truth and I was trying to understand Dave’s perspective too,” she explained. “You see that a lot ’cause I give him a lot of grace. But I was so in my head [that] I’m like, ‘Am I the one that’s morally wrong looking at this and I just am not seeing it?’ And it is very comforting to have the world be like, ‘No, you did nothing wrong.’ This is not a reflection of my inability to navigate a serious relationship. If anything, I think it gives me more credit that I can navigate relationships.”
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Us subsequently asked Lauren how she thinks she would’ve handled things if roles were reversed — and Dave had a former flame (who lived in the same building as them, BTW) that was stirring the pot.
“It’s a really good question,” she said, noting that she was acknowledging Dave’s perspective at the time. “I was like, ‘That would suck. I would hate if I had to see them in our living space or even know that these conversations were happening.’ I remember thinking I understood why Dave was listening to his people and wanting their opinion on. … Hehe was allowed to make judgements about the person that he just met and hearing conflicting opinions about his friends. It was just simply the fact that I wasn’t part of any of the conversations where my main frustration is coming from.”
On the show, Lauren told Dave that this former hookup had texted her when they moved on. When asked if she or Dave spoke to him while filming, she teased that there will be more exposed in due time: “We’ll share more later about communication that was being had outside of that time.”
One thing is clear — Lauren has no interest in giving this “other guy,” who has gone viral on social media for making a fake Love Is Blind cast photo, the time of day.
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“If you need more proof that I was telling the truth and he was fabricating the story, look no further,” she said. “Actually don’t go look at it because you should not be giving him more attention than he is getting right now. it’s exactly what he wanted, but I feel like I rest my case there.”
Lauren and Dave were one of five couples that got engaged on season 8 of Love Is Blind, but it’s still TBD if they make it down the aisle. The first nine episodes are currently streaming on Netflix and three new episodes drop on Friday, February 28.
