Love Is Blind stars David “Dave” Bettenburg and Lauren O’Brien left the pods engaged, but they split before they actually made it to the altar. During the season 8 reunion, hosts Vanessa and Nick Lachey asked the medical device salesman if Lauren was “the one that got away.”
“I do,” Dave, 33, said. “I think about it all the time.”
When Vanessa, 44, urged him to tell Lauren, 31, how he felt, Dave struggled to get the words out before admitting he “didn’t think he could do that right now.”
However, Lauren had trouble taking Dave’s words to heart.
“To be honest, I just don’t fully believe it,” she replied. “You’ve had my phone number for the last year. We’ve seen each other at bars. You’ve made no effort to show that in any capacity. You acted like I was making you choose between the devil and your family, and I was not making you make any decisions.”
While Lauren felt like Dave had “a lot of growing and healing to do,” she made it clear that she didn’t think that “equated to him being a narcissist and a manipulator,” which Dave said he “appreciated.”
Dave and Lauren connected early on in the pods, but once they returned to the real world, the former couple ran into several issues. While they were vacationing in Honduras, Dave learned that he had mutual friends with a man Lauren had been in a casual relationship with prior to filming Love Is Blind. Even though Lauren insisted that things had never been serious between her and the unnamed man, Dave struggled to accept it.
“It is going to be weird for me that I know both of your exes,” Dave confessed to Lauren after discovering the news. “Not, like, well, but I know them. It’s a little weird that I know them. Again, I don’t know them well … And I don’t want that to affect our relationship when we go back. I asked you if you were seeing anyone right before this experiment started. Hearing that I was like, ‘OK …’”
He later told producers, “How do you go from seeing someone so recently to like, ‘I’m ready for marriage?’ That just seems like a huge step in between, where it’s like … how did you … I don’t know. That’s tough.”
Dave and Lauren’s relationship continued to crumble after they returned to Minneapolis, and the issue with her previous hookup and his sister not wanting to meet Lauren proved to be too much and they broke off their engagement.
“I’m sad, I’m mad, I’m frustrated. We have such a great connection. I feel like I let her down in a way, because I couldn’t get over my own ego, my own pride that she could’ve seen some other guy before me, which is very normal,” Dave said during a confessional after their split. “I’m mad at myself for that, but I love her and I probably always will. But at the end of the day, this felt like the right decision. Love is blind, but I don’t think marriage is.”
However, he seemingly began to regret his decision when he ran into Lauren during a group outing with some of their fellow Love Is Blind costars.
“I wanted to reach out to Lauren ever since last night, ever since things ended. I wanna say hi to her and I wanna go home with her, and, like, hold her and everything, but I know it’s probably too late for that. I suck at wanting what I can’t have. When I had it and I can’t have it, so …” Dave admitted to the producers. “I don’t know. I feel like I took those things a little too personal. I do wish that I could go back and do things differently, and hear things differently, and process things differently. Lauren deserves that. I love her and I should be sticking up for her. I would love to go talk to her because I do feel like I could still be that guy for her.”
While he eventually managed to confess his feelings about their breakup to Lauren, she told him that while she wanted to “believe it so badly” she felt like they were “past” the point of getting back together.
