The six couples we saw get engaged weren’t the only Love Is Blind stars making serious connections on the Netflix show. Series creator Chris Coelen revealed in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that there were actually two more couples that didn’t make the final cut. Explaining that there were eight engagements in total, he shared Rory “Drybear” Newbrough also popped the question after falling for Danielle Drouin.
“They were together for a little while, and then they broke up,” Coelen said. Though neither cast member was seen much during the show, they both can be spotted chatting with other contestants in early episodes. The series creator also shared that Danielle was actually involved in two romances. “She ended up dating the guy who appears at the very beginning of the show, Matt [Thomas],” he explained.
When it came time to fly the couples out to spend time at a resort in Cancún, Mexico, though, the series had to focus in on only a few. “We had actually more success on this show, from that standpoint, than we were even able to document,” he said. “As a producer, I was kind of nervous like, is anybody actually gonna get engaged? Is anyone going to make it to the altar? And, in the end, we actually had more couples get engaged than we were able to follow. … We only have so much time to tell a story, but there are lots of interesting stories.”
The creator also weighed in on comparisons to Lifetime’s Married at First Sight. Both shows are produced by Kinetic Content, but Coelen thinks of them more as inverses than two takes on the same premise. “I think Married at First Sight is a very different entry point,” he said. “Those are people who want to be committed and are willing to let someone else match them. They know nothing about each other. This is almost the opposite of that. Every single person on Love Is Blind makes their own decision. No decision is made for them. They decide and they feel truly like they know everything about the person when they get engaged.”
Is that possible when you’ve only actually been chatting with someone for a few days? He certainly thinks so. “We were only able to show so much on the show — but they were talking around the clock while they were in the pods,” Coelen continued. “The depth of conversation, vulnerability and openness they had with one another was incredible. Every single person, whether they got engaged or whether they didn’t, talked about how this was a life-changing, transformative experience. They learned something about themselves, about who they are, what they want, how they react, in addition to the other people, in a way that had never, never [been] done.”