Love Is Blind season 9 star Anna Yuan has responded to an onslaught of fan commentary about her body.
“Hi friends, reminder that I am human,” Anna, 28, wrote via her Instagram Stories on Thursday, October 2. “A human who has devoted her life into a craft to make other women feel beautiful.”
The hairstylist uploaded a handful of screenshots of social media users calling her “chubby” and falsely claiming that she wouldn’t find The One on the show simply because she’s not a “hot girl.”
“I have struggled with my weight since I was a little girl,” Anna said on Thursday. “For the first time in my life, I am proud of how healthy I am. I’m not a character.”
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She continued, “I’m a real human being just like you. Be kind. Love you all anyway.”
In a follow-up post on her Instagram Stories, Anna implored social media users to stop “flooding” her DMs.
“It’s very insane seeing people come out of the woodworks to talk about me,” she wrote. “If you think you know me, you actually don’t.”
Anna is one of the contestants on season 9 of Love Is Blind, which is set in Denver, Colorado. Despite sparking early pod bonds with Patrick Suzuki and Blake Anderson, Anna withdrew from the experiment. Her exit sent shockwaves through the pods, especially for 30-year-old Patrick who was waiting to go on a date with her.
“I started seeing myself being pretty vulnerable, and it scared me a little bit because this is an intimate part of my brain. These are very sensitive topics for me,” Anna told Tudum of her decision to leave the show. “It’s not that I’m just sharing it with whoever I’m dating or the other women — this is going to be broadcast for people.”
Anna, as the daughter of Chinese immigrants, was also worried about her parents’ reactions to the show premise.
“With my parents being immigrants and having a language barrier, I’ve always naturally been their helper,” she explained to the outlet. “When I told them, ‘Hey, Mom and Dad, I’m going on this show, they’re going to take my phone, they were like, ‘Are you being kidnapped?’”
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Out of concern for her parents, Anna made her final decision to return home.
“I was a wreck,” she said. “My eyes were almost swollen shut from crying. I was embarrassed.”
While Anna claimed that she was given the choice to tell Patrick about her plans during their planned date, she opted against it because she didn’t want to be filmed anymore.
“I don’t think I regret it because I don’t think the connections were strong enough to have a successful marriage from there,” she added to Tudum, noting she applied for the show without expectations of an engagement in the first place. “I went in there thinking that anything could happen. I’d be OK if I didn’t find somebody because it’s such a wild thing, and it’s so far off from how any of us have dated before.”
After Anna left, Blake focused on his connections with Megan Walerius and Kait Nemunaitis, respectively, before also leaving the show single. As for Patrick, he proposed to fellow contestant Kacie McIntosh, who ended their engagement after their face-to-face reveal.
Love Is Blind season 9 is currently streaming on Netflix. New episodes drop weekly.
