Warning: This post contains spoilers from the season 4 finale of Love Is Blind.
Zack Goytowski and Bliss Poureetezadi said “I do” on the Love Is Blind season 4 finale — but how does Irina Solomonova really feel about their romance?
During an exclusive interview with Us Weekly, Zack, 32, noted that he didn’t keep in touch with Irina, 26, the woman he initially proposed to in the pods. (They split after the trip to Mexico.)
“Not after [Bliss and I] got married,” Zack said. “But there were some things she continued to text me after Mexico. I never reached out to her again. And she did try to subtly sabotage our relationship when we got back from Mexico.”
While Zack didn’t want to go “into details,” Irina was surprised by the suggestion.
“I’m a little shocked because this is my first time hearing that and I honestly have nothing bad to say about him or Bliss,” Irina told Us in response. “I genuinely love Zack and I genuinely thought I was going to marry him and I’ve never had anything bad to say about Bliss either. In the pods — I feel like that is all on camera. And I always said I thought she was beautiful. I thought she was amazing. When I first met her, I literally was like, ‘I wish I had a brother you could marry,’ because I liked her.”
Irina told Us that it “hurts me a lot” hearing Zack’s remark.
“Because when we broke up I told him, ‘Hey, if you wanna go pursue things with Bliss, you should.’ And he said he didn’t want to because he didn’t want that story for her, but I’m happy for them and I feel really bad that he feels that way,” she explained. “That is not my intention at all. And I feel like if I get the chance to have that conversation with Bliss and Zack, I will. But that is a hundred percent not how I felt. I generally wanted to marry Zack. It wasn’t about a game, it wasn’t about picking or choosing or winning. I feel I was in my own head, living my own life and what Bliss and her story with Zack was completely different.”
Zack and Irina called it quits following their trip to Mexico days after their engagement.
“I would say I made a mistake with not picking Bliss [in the first place], and I think that was the real mistake,” Zack told Us. “I knew that when I ended it [with Irina] and was kind of dealing with that. I don’t know how much you could see of the turmoil that I was going through, but when I did end it, then my very first thing was I wanted to go and tell [producers] to bring [Bliss] back and that I had made the wrong choice, but I knew I had to live with the decision.”
Irina, for her part, told Us: “[Meeting him] was a lot more challenging than I thought it was gonna be. Like, it was really hard to connect the connection we made in the pods versus being together [in person]. I will say that when I saw him it wasn’t anything about his looks or anything, but I just had this gut feeling that something just didn’t feel right and I didn’t feel safe or comfortable. … It was just something that grew and I feel I was kinda trying to force or pressure myself to feel these feelings for him.”
Zack and Bliss were among the three couples who got married during the Friday, April 14, finale. Tiffany Pennywell and Brett Brown and Kwame Appiah and Chelsea Griffin also exchanged vows.
“I think we both had a pretty strong understanding of what we were gonna say when we got up there,” Zack told Us. “I didn’t, honestly, have any concerns. I mean, it was intense, for sure, but we had spent a lot of time talking about, ’Is this the right move? Are we doing the right thing here?’ And so I think we both kind of had solidarity moving into the wedding.”
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Love Is Blind is now streaming on Netflix. The live reunion airs on the streaming service on Sunday, April 16, at 8 p.m. ET.
