Exclusive Interview
‘Love Is Blind’: Dave Reveals What He Knew About Lauren’s Hookup Before the Pods
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Episodes 1-12 of Love Is Blind Season 8.]
Most of the drama on Love Is Blind Season 8 so far has come from outside forces. For Dave Bettenberg and Lauren O’Brien, their relationship struggled the second they got out of the pods. Pressure from his sister and knowledge that Lauren had a “friends with benefits” situation just before coming on the show evolved into a tornado of complications for the engaged couple.
In the latest batch of episodes, Lauren and Dave’s relationship reaches its breaking point. Despite Lauren consistently telling Dave that her previous relationship was casual, Dave couldn’t get over it. Lauren was ready to move forward with Dave, but his fixation on her past was the point of no return. In a conversation with Swooon, Dave opened up about what you didn’t see on TV and whether or not he’s crossed paths with Lauren’s ex-boyfriend in the year since the show filmed.
“I ran into him over the summer,” Dave told Swooon about Lauren’s ex, who has been identified as Daniel Nides. Dave was tight-lipped about additional details regarding this interaction.
The 33-year-old also shed more insight into what he knew going into the pods. He admitted he was indirectly aware of Lauren’s hookup before the experiment.
“The interesting thing about the story that I haven’t really shared is that — and I’m gonna continue to back Lauren and do my best in that situation — but I knew there was one of the 16 girls on the other side that was seeing this man prior to leaving for the show,” he explained. “I have a screenshot of the text on February 3 of last year, the day before we left. I was asking that friend to ask the guy what her name was, so I could stay away from who this person was, and he wouldn’t give up the name. I have a screenshot of that text, so I knew there was one of the women over there that was seeing this guy.”
He continued, “Luck of the draw, apparently, just turns out that it was Lauren. I feel like I’m seeing online [that] it’s a lot about me having an issue with her having a physical connection with this man. And that’s not it at all. It was all about learning this all in the span of a few days after getting my phone back, being engaged, and having to plan a wedding in two weeks. It just was a lot to go through. It was never about the guy or their relationship. It was just about the timeline.”
Courtesy of Netflix
Lauren admitted to Dave in Episode 11 that she and her ex had hooked up a week before she left for the experiment, not two days before like Dave had heard from friends. She viewed their relationship as casual but said her ex had a “different interpretation” of their time together. Dave and Lauren were unable to see eye-to-eye on the situation.
“What people aren’t understanding about this entire situation with me and Lauren and her ex is that the information I was being fed directly from my sister and from my very close friends that know the guy that she was seeing was that they had been dating for three months, and she had stayed at his place a night before we all left,” Dave told Swooon.
Prior to their split, Dave’s family never met Lauren on or off camera. The 33-year-old explained why his loved ones, particularly his sister, were opposed to meeting his then-fiancée.
“The main reason was because the guy, her ex, told one of his best friends, who knows my sister, directly about all these things, that they had been dating for three months, and he was never really okay,” Dave told Swooon. “They never really ended things, and then she ended up going on the show anyway. My sister knew all of this. She was one of the people that is sending me this information. At that point, I mean, she already had her mind made up. She was like, ‘There’s just no way I’m gonna do this.’ There’s nothing I could really do. I tried.”
However, Dave noted that there’s footage of him “working through this process. I have hours of content that I filmed with Joey [Leveille] talking through the situation and how to best handle it. Unfortunately, they don’t show any of that. It kind of looks like I just was looking for an out or something, and I feel like that’s just not what happened.”
Looking back, Dave admitted that he would have handled the situation with Lauren differently. “I don’t know if we would have ended up getting married,” he said. “I mean, we weren’t even allowed to get to the parts where we talk about logistics of the marriage and how we were going to navigate all of these other aspects of it. The show just got so hyper focused on this one situation, unfortunately, and I guess the whole idea of our relationship. I guess we’ll just never know. It’s unfortunate.”
Reporting by Lauren Dehollogne
Love Is Blind, Season 8, (Episodes 1-6), Streaming Now, Netflix
Love Is Blind, Season 8 (Episodes 7-9), Streaming Now, Netflix
Love Is Blind, Season 8 (Episodes 10-12), Streaming Now, Netflix
Love Is Blind, Season 8 Finale, March 7, Netflix
