‘Love is Blind’: Jessica Claims She Tried to Leave the Show, But Producers Say Otherwise

Now that the finale of Netflix’s new show Love is Blind has aired, people have more than a few questions. People are confused about who got married and who didn’t. Among the shocking marriage refusals were Giannina Gibelli and Damian Powers and Kenny Barnes and Kelly Chase, who seemed to generally be in a good place or fighting for their marriages the whole time. But the most shocking part of the finale was Jessica Batten’s utter lack of sympathy for her fiance Mark Cuevas when she decided not to marry him.

She seemed to know for a while that she wasn’t going to go through with the marriage, so why did she stay in the experiment for so long?

Jessica and Mark’s relationship

Batten and Cuevas’ relationship was doomed from the start. Batten was hung up on the connection that she made with Matt Barnett. When Barnett chose another girl, Batten went back to Cuevas but was never fully in the relationship. She spent the whole experiment pushing Cuevas away and thinking of reasons that their relationship would not work.

In the end, she smiled at the altar when Cuevas said that he wanted to marry her, but then told him that she did not want the same. While speaking to the cameras after the wedding, she said she wasn’t sorry at all about her decision.

Jessica says she tried to leave the show

Batten knew she didn’t want to marry Cuevas early on in the show.

“It was psychological warfare, for sure, because planning a wedding is stressful enough, I hear,” Batten told Entertainment Weekly. “But when you’re planning a wedding with someone that I knew I didn’t want to marry him, we weren’t ready for that, and we actually had multiple conversations and we were both on the same page about that. We weren’t ready to marry each other in that allotted amount of time that we had. We were very much on the same page about that.”

But she claims that she wasn’t allowed to leave the experiment early and had to go through with the wedding regardless of how she felt. When asked if she could have ended her relationship with Cuevas before getting to the altar, she said no.

“Yeah, I mean, I had to stay,” she said. “I definitely had a conversation about leaving and I wasn’t able to do that. My dog got sick too, and almost died during the show, I had so much other stuff going on.”

Producers say they didn’t force anyone to stay on the show

Though making it to the weddings was one of the goals of the experience, show creator Chris Coelen says that no one was forced to do anything they didn’t want to do.

“Well, they obviously could back out of it or not go through with it if they wanted to because there was one couple that didn’t go through with [the wedding],” he told the outlet. “So nobody was forced to do anything.”

Obviously, both of these claims cannot be true. So, either Batten isn’t telling the truth or there is actually come clause in the participant’s contracts that says they have to make it to the altar. Though the latter would be strange as Carlton Morton and Diamond Jack left the show after the couples’ trip to Mexico.