Warning: This post contains spoilers for Love Is Blind Season 5, Episodes 5-7.
Love Is Blind’s most confusing love triangle has ended in a break-up.
Season 5’s Uche and Aaliyah seemed to gravitate toward one another immediately during the first four episodes of the dating series, which debuted last Friday on Netflix. But then, he made a shocking revelation: He’d dated another one of the women before, and she happened to be Aaliyah’s best friend on the show, Lydia. This week, as viewers find out, the confusing and emotional fallout was too much for the couple to withstand. In Episode 5, which debuted Friday along with Episodes 6 and 7, Uche and Aaliyah seemed to say goodbye for good.
Love Is Blind creator Chris Koelen recently told Variety that the show had no idea about Uche and Lydia’s past, but added that producers forbade the pair from mentioning it to anyone right away. They were allowed to stay, he said, “if they did not immediately tell people about their history. And at that point, on day 1 of the pods, we all felt that the information wasn’t relevant and we all agreed revealing it would have been destructive to everyone’s overall experience.”
It’s hard not to wonder what could’ve happened between these two, had they been allowed to communicate freely. Then again, Uche was also kind of a jerk to Aaliyah when she shared a shameful moment from her past (cheating on a partner two years ago), so maybe all’s well that ends well. Ultimately, Aaliyah has said she believes her choice was the right one—and that’s really what matters.
Although Uche, Aaliyah, Lydia, and Milton’s love quadrangle takes up some real estate in this week’s batch of episodes, it’s not the only site of emotional chaos. There’s also Izzy and Stacy, who are clashing over money and his extreme “bachelor” behavior. (He’s a grown man with a cabinet full of paper plates and Solo cups, and she, meanwhile, wants to know if he’s willing to split the cost of a new HVAC system but balks at the idea of going dutch on any date, ever.) Lydia and Milton seem to be doing pretty well, although he has clocked that she can be a little “bossy”—as in, she wants to dictate the color of his shorts.
The biggest casualty this week would be JP and Taylor, who seemed like a done deal in the pods but turned awkward the minute they saw each other in person. This week, they mostly seem to be sulking in one another’s presence, while JP shows off as much patriotic attire as possible. (I counted some flag-printed swim trunks, another flag on his button-down shirt, and a tank top emblazoned with “U.S.A.”) Eventually, Taylor finally pressed JP enough about his silence to find out why he’d become so awkward around her—and boy, was it a doozy.
“I understand that you tried to present yourself and look as best you could, but I feel like if you would have presented yourself like this, without any makeup, it would have been better,” JP tells his fiancée—who can barely contain her disbelief. “So the way I looked made you communicate differently?”
As JP tells Taylor, “It felt like you were fake.” He later complains that her “caked-up face” had gotten all over his jacket. As far as he was concerned, he said, “This is not a real person.” The morning after, the two predictably broke up—because really, how do you come back from that?
This leaves us with only two surviving couples going into next week’s episodes: Stacy and Izzy, and Lydia and Milton. Both of these pairs have some trouble on the horizon.
Stacy and Izzy seem mostly solid—at least, they sure seem to have a good time gossiping about Izzy’s ex, Johnie, at a cast reunion in Episode 7—but the money issue feels like a big one. Stacy’s father seems to be hinting at something when he tells Izzy, “The whole Love Is Blind thing, I get that, but love also needs to eat. Love needs to have a roof. Sometimes love wants to fly first-class.” Also, she did not seem to like his “lost and found” basket of jewelry and trinkets left behind by random women he no longer remembers. All of this to say, it’ll be a steep road ahead for these two; for now let’s just hope the HVAC holds up.
Lydia and Milton might be the season’s biggest wild card. She’s a 30-year-old geologist, and he’s a 24-year-old engineer who is also banned from playing Pokemon Showdown in five different countries because he talks “too much shit.” He doesn’t seem wild about Lydia’s history with Uche, especially when Uche shows up at the cast reunion mixer in Episode 7. Lydia, meanwhile, can’t stand to be around Uche; within minutes, she begins yelling and says he has a narcissistic personality, while he shows her screenshots that he says indicate that she’d been spying on people he followed on Instagram during their relationship.
As we see in the preview for next week, Uche becomes convinced that Lydia planned for them to be there at the same time. When Aaliyah and Uche broke up, she also told Uche that she’d worried he and Lydia planned to be on the show together. Evidently, our messiest entanglement yet is not about to get any simpler any time soon.
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