A reminder to everyone who watches Love Is Blind: what you see on Netflix is never the full story. Love Is Blind — specifically the pod portion of the season — is a massive production with lots of moving parts involving a whole lot of singles with a whole lot of personality. It’s impossible for the show to put all that drama on-air — but Love Is Blind showrunner and creator Chris Coelen can always spill some of the behind-the-scenes tea after the fact. And in an interview with People, Coelen revealed what really happened behind-the-scenes with the biggest, most shocking reveal in Love Is Blind history: Uche and Lydia’s bombshell that they dated each other prior to filming.
Of that moment, Coelen said he and the entire LIB team were blindsided by the reveal that Uche and Lydia not only knew each other outside the pods, but that they’d actually dated. “We had absolutely no idea,” said Coelen. “The intention is that we have a pool of people that don’t know each other.” Coelen did say that, since every season of Love Is Blind pulls singles from the same city, they have had instances where participants of the same gender have known each other outside of the pods — but that doesn’t affect the “experiment” (as they call it). “We’ve never had, to my knowledge, people who have had a relationship in the past. It’s just mind-blowing that that was the case, and truly shocking on day one that that information was delivered to me.”
According to Coelen, Uche and Lydia’s previous relationship was missed completely during Love Is Blind’s “very thorough” vetting process. “We really go to some great lengths, and to the best of our ability, we try to ensure that the pool of people in the pods don’t know each other,” said Coelen. “Obviously, we’re not infallible, and this one happened. However it happened, it happened, and we had to deal with the ramifications of it.”
Coelen says that he found out about Lydia and Uche moments after they pieced together that they knew each other. “I was sitting in the control room on day one of dating,” said Coelen. “I think we have 89 cameras in the pods and there’s lots of stuff happening. We have a big team of hundreds of crew members, and there’s always somebody listening to something. Whoever was listening in to Uche and Lydia’s conversation, as soon as that date was coming to an end, they came over and said, ‘These two people know each other. They had this relationship [previously].'”
Production pulled both participants aside separately and initially intended to hand plane tickets to Uche and Lydia and send them back to Houston. This surprised Uche and Lydia, who both told producers that they wanted to continue, that they were serious about the process, and that they had no interest in pursuing a relationship with each other in the pods. Production told them they could stay under one condition:
“So we said, ‘If we were to allow you to continue being part of this experiment, knowing that you are really passionate about being here, we will allow you to continue under one condition.’ We never police what anybody says, but in this case, it was the only time where we’ve said, ‘We would like if you would not reveal this to the others.'”
That request ended up affecting how the pod experience would unfold for not only Lydia and Uche, but for their pod partner’s Milton and Aaliyah. But this also explains some of Uche and Lydia’s behavior in the pods. From a viewer’s POV, it looked incredibly shady that Uche made Aaliyah feel so bad about having cheated in her past while he was sitting on this major secret. It also made Lydia look a bit sus as she comforted Aaliyah while not telling her the truth about her past with Uche. In reality, Uche and Lydia were withholding that important information from Aaliyah because of production, not because of their own motives. But once the producers saw how serious Lydia and Uche were about their new partners, Milton and Aaliyah, they allowed them to reveal their past — and then all the drama happened.
We’ll never know how things would have played out had production allowed Lydia and Uche to tell people in the pods about their shared past right away, or if production had immediately removed both of them from the experiment altogether. At least now we know more about the reality we are living in, the one where production delayed Uche and Lydia from telling the truth for roughly a week. Viewers will have to wait until Friday, September 29 to see where Lydia, Uche, and Aaliyah’s story goes next.