It’s an understatement to say Love Is Blind season 8 star Dave Bettenburg is struggling with fiancée Lauren O’Brien’s past situationship — but does he have a right to be upset?
“I think everyone’s situation is different,” Vanessa Lachey exclusively told Us Weekly during an interview with her cohost and husband, Nick Lachey, when asked if there are rules for how long you should be single before the experiment. “It’s very important to not be seeing someone while you’re on the show — we’ve seen that play out or not play out so well. But there’s no right or wrong.”
David and Lauren left the pods engaged in the first drop of episodes on February 14. In the second installment, released on Friday, February 21, David begins to give Lauren a hard time for hooking up with someone — with whom he has mutual friends — in the months leading up to production.
“When you meet someone for the first time, and if you found out they just got out of a relationship, then you navigate that conflict,” Vanessa continued. “And [we’re] seeing how Lauren and David navigated that conflict, how what was important to him might not have been that important to her, or vice versa.”
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Nick acknowledged that David “felt it was gonna be a little awkward running into people that he knew,” but added, “That’s part of life [and] it’s not a specific Love Is Blind issue.”
On the show, Lauren spoke to the Netflix cameras about her situationship.
“Dave was like, ‘Did you date anyone before coming on here?’ I go, ‘I was, like, talking to someone a couple of months ago, but I wouldn’t have said that I dated them,’ but Dave has mutual friends with him,” she explained. “I was giving [Dave] names and he’s like, ‘Oh, I know him. I see him at the pool all the time.’”
While Dave said he didn’t want the situation to affect their relationship after their post-pods trip to Honduras, he struggled to let it go.
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“How do you go from seeing someone so recently to like, ‘I’m ready for marriage?’” he asked. “That just seems like a huge step in between. … That’s tough.”
Upon returning to Minneapolis, Minnesota — which the cast has reiterated doesn’t have a large dating pool — Lauren’s friends tried to assure Dave that the pre-show romance wasn’t serious.
“We would’ve hung out with him if they were dating,” one pal argued.
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Still, Dave does not appear to let it go, leaving Lauren feeling “helpless” at the end of the episodes.
The first nine episodes of Love Is Blind season 8 are currently streaming on Netflix. The next three episodes drop on Friday, February 28.
