Interview
‘Love Is Blind’ Star Hannah Jiles Details Post-Breakup Hardships: ‘I Was Really Struggling’
“I have a very polarizing personality,” Hannah Jiles from Season 7 of Love Is Blind told Swooon. She knew going into the experiment people could’ve potentially had strong reactions to her. “I’m a big person. I’m a lot. I can be a lot,” she admitted.
However, the way people were critiquing her surprised the now 27-year-old woman, who dipped her toe into the world of reality TV to find love. She revealed, “Okay, come for a personality and things I said to Nick [Dorka], but maybe don’t come for my looks or physical things about me.”
Hannah feels like she has had a period of growth and healing since her time on Love Is Blind. First having a connection with two men Leo Braudy and Nick, she chose the latter to actually jump into the post-pod journey with. From the infamous “duck incident” to a somewhat flirty reunion between Katie and Nick, Hannah realized her relationship with Nick wasn’t meant to be forever. After all, they weren’t really on the same wavelength on anything — from finances to boiling water.
“It didn’t just take me to look back on and see the things that I’ve done. I was there, I filmed it, I said it, I know the things that I said, and we’ve had plenty of time. And so in the last year, it’s been a rough year. It was hard. I had to learn a lot of things,” she told Swooon, before mentioning some of her actions on the show.
Hannah quit her job right before joining the cast, and then it took her almost six months to find another one. This had never been the case for her, which made her realize, “I would judge people a lot more than I should have.” During that time she felt sorry for herself, but that difficult period has only made her stronger.
“Growth-wise, I know I’m direct. Apparently, I can be b*tchy. Like, I am. My family says it. That’s just who I am. But there’s a lot better ways to say things, and if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. And I’ve just been really working on speech, and I have really bad anxiety, and I feel like you see me kind of crashing out in the show.”
She started taking anxiety medication after the show. “That’s been very helpful for me and keeps me a lot calmer,” she began. When she’s stressed out, she’s learned to “go to take a moment for myself, and then I’ll come back to the situation and we can talk. So it’s just like learning different things, of inherently bad behaviors that I have, and how to fix them, and how to speak better to people and be a lot kinder when I say things. And just because it’s honest doesn’t mean you have to say it.”
Love Is Blind, Season 7, Episode 12, October 23, Netflix
Love Is Blind, Season 7 Reunion, October 30, 9/8c, Netflix
