Love is Blind's Lauren says how she really feels about her relationship with Dave on Blind Love podcast with show alumni Bliss and Zack

To recap, Lauren got engaged to Dave in season 8 of the hit Netflix dating show after forming a connection in the pods, but they never made it to their wedding day.

Once they had met and were given their phones back, their relationship faced a huge test when Dave received messages from his friends informing him that Lauren had a boyfriend while being on the experiment.

The man remained nameless, but Dave realised it was someone he vaguely knew from the gym. She told him that this was not true, and that she had only hooked up with him a few times in the months leading up to the experiment.

Dave didn’t know what to believe, however, and refused to introduce Lauren to his friends and family. The situation drove a wedge between them and they broke up.

At the reunion, which aired on Sunday March 9 and was filmed around a year after filming ended, Dave admitted since filming ended he had found out Lauren had been telling the truth and the man had been lying. He expressed a desire to date her, but she shot him down, telling him she was “lightyears” ahead of him in terms of emotional maturity.

Lauren, who previously said on her Instagram that she wished more of the fun herself and her ex-fiancé had during their time together had made it in to the final edit of the show, has now given an important update on how she feels about what happened between the pair - and his subsequent apology after finding out what the man had said wasn’t true.

Lauren was speaking on the Blind Love podcast, which is hosted by season four couple Bliss Poureetezadi and Zack Goytowski, on Sunday (April 13). Sharing a teaser clip of the podcast to his Instagram page, Zack wrote: “This is a story for anyone who’s ever stayed too long. For anyone who’s still stuck in the pain someone else left behind. This is what it looks like to walk away—and still hold your head high. On this episode of Blind Love, Lauren shares how she found the courage to leave a relationship that wasn’t right, how she healed while taking the high road, and how she refused to let someone else define her worth.”

On the podcast, Lauren said: “The hardest part about this is is that he’s taken accountability for the surface level thing of not believing me and listening to his friends over me, but I don’t feel like there’s accountability with ‘hey I tried to embarrass you on national television, I made you the scapegoat’ . . . I feel like he thinks he’s taken this accountability but I have never gotten a phone call, in person, off camera ‘I am sorry for how I hurt you in this’.

Lauren said she had “emotional whiplash” from how Dave acted once the couple returned to Minneapolis, at some points seeming to be affected more by the “outside noise” and the accusation that she had a boyfriend than others. She added: “I genuinely think he thought, even maybe up until recently, until the episodes started coming out, that I was going to be the one to be honestly bullied online for going in to this having a boyfriend. . . It was a way for him to not go through this, not because he’s not ready and he wasn’t in a mental space to be married but because ‘look, I chose this girl and leaned in to this experience, and I found this great person but she had a boyfriend’.”

She went on to say that she thinks Dave used her apparent links to the unnamed man as an “out”, when in reality it was he who wasn’t ready for marriage and had been hesitant to discuss things about their future too far in advance.

Later in the interview, the reality star claimed that Dave told her off camera that he didn’t care who she had slept with prior to entering the experiment, but that he has feeling overwhelmed. However, when they then went on a bowling date shortly afterwards, which was caught on camera, he said he didn’t think he could accept the fact she had hooked up with someone shortly before filming for the show began.

She said that was the turning point in the relationship for her. “I was like ‘I’ve gone through this with you [Dave] 15 times and I can’t keep defending myself. I’ve never had to explain or defend myself this much in my life.” She added that she became “done” when, just after the bowling date, Dave got mad at her for “calling out his s**** behaviour” and also spoke poorly about her dad.

Confirming that she is single now, though she did date another pod squad member called Scott who wasn’t really shown on screen months after the process came to an end, Lauren also told Bliss and Zack that she doesn’t know what she’s looking for now in terms of a future partner. She added that she’s going to give herself more time before going back on the dating scene.

The reality star added that she thought producers have achieved “85/90 percent accuracy in terms of how her love story with Dave was told on-screen, after Bliss commented that participants have no control over the way the show is edited. Although she did add that she was “lighter” in the pods than she was portrayed to be and not as much “in [her] head” as it appeared.

She also described the Love is Blind experiment as an “out of body experience”, and said that she was “heartbroken” when her relationship with Dave ended as although they had only known each other for a few weeks she had gotten further with him emotionally than she had done with any previous romantic partners.

In the comments section of the podcast teaser on Instagram, Lauren clarified her feelings, however: “This relationship ended over a year ago and I don’t have any ill will toward Dave…we’re gucci,” she said. “But part of this season airing includes rehashing and answering questions about my experience.” Showing there’s no ill-will towards her former husband-to-be, she added: “I still v much stand by the fact that he shouldn’t be getting the amount of hate sent his way.”

Back in March, Dave claimed he and Lauren “hooked up” after filming for the show finished last year while speaking on the After Curfew podcast. “We had a couple random hangouts,” he said. “I think that’s new information. It wasn’t often, it was just a couple times. We would go out with the rest of the group . . . and yeah, we hung up out a couple of times after that. It was such a weird position to be in.”

He also implied that he hoped the pair would rekindle their romance, but claimed Lauren “wasn’t willing” to wait. “I was thinking I was going to give it a little time and if we could hang out without all the pressure, if we could just see where things go [and] take it slow . . . that’s kind of where my head was at,” he said. He went on: “In her defense though, she is looking for her person and she really doesn’t want to wait around, I don’t believe, so I don’t think she was really willing to wait for me to figure that out.”

Dave has not publicly commented on Lauren’s comments on the Blind Love podcast.

* Watch Love is Blind season 8 on Netflix now. Seasons 1 to 7 are also available to watch, as well as series 1 of Love is Blind UK.