‘Love is Blind’ explodes after friends with benefits situation threatens to derail involvement

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Love is blind Season 8

From the moment Dave Bettenburg showed his “pride of your” tattoo, styled in his mother’s handwriting, I knew he would be Love is blind The mandatory villain of season 8.

It is not that “mother” tattoos are an automatic “ick”. With the right version they can be sweet. Yet there was something about it this tattoo this Man who regained the letters on his arm to spell ‘problems’.

This is a man who likes to make jokes who implies that women in fact are in fact seconds of their so -called last f *** skilled day. This is a man who complains, because he works in plastic surgery, he has seen many women with too much botox and wants to settle with something else. This is a man whose ‘type’ generally does not include teachers (whatever that means) and who seems shocked to hear that the former teacher with whom he would get impulsively in Mexico in Mexico and even a few nudes in her spare time sent.

Perhaps he has received the ‘villain editing’, but as depicted, Bettenburg seems to me as a man who mentally meets every woman he meets in one of the two binders: the Madonnas and the whores. The virgin teachers and the sexy botox seekers. In that context, the mother -tattoo starts to feel like a signal that he has certain expectations that no living, breathable young woman could ever hope to meet. Learning that he can’t handle his fiancé, the perfectly beautiful Lauren O’Brien, a “friends with benefits situation”, not long before he entered the pods, was hardly a shock.

The whole thing feels like a textbook example of “Tempest in a teapot.” It turns out that Bettenburg runs in the same circles as two of O’Brien’s “Exen”, whom they actually agree that she dates. Her actual ex lives with a friend of Bettenburg’s, who feels potentially uncomfortable, but that is not even the problem he takes on. Instead, Homt Bettenburg on the man O’brien dumped not long before he came to the show.

O’Brien says that she and the mysterious man were “friends with benefits” and never left seriously; The friends of Bettenburg are at different. Instead, they claim that she joined him for 48 hours before she came to the show. Both she and her friends say it was more than a week earlier, and anyway, it really works So much out? According to O’Brien, Bettenburg did not seem to think very much about this man before. But now he apparently relies on his word on hers.

The Bottom Line: Bettenburg claims to want to trust the supposed love of his life, but refuses to let her speak with one of the apparently many people in his circle who now question her character. It is annoying, tiring and borderline manipulative.

This is nothing new for the Lib universe. The “What makes a good woman?” Discussion feels so old inside and outside the show that Bettenburg would probably joke about its despair before the wedding.

Every season it seems that at least one woman runs a certain – and unfair – expectations. In Season 5, Uche Okoroha Hypocritical Aaliyah Cosby, after she had revealed that she had ever cheated an ex. In season 2, Abishek “Shake” chatterjee set up a martyr -routine when his (beautiful) fiancée, Depti Vempati, his aesthetic norms were not appreciated.

As reality fans know, the problem extends much further Love is blind.

Sociologist Alicia Denby studied toxicity and femininity Love Island And discovered that the images of sexuality of the show reinforce the gender expectation that men are more sexually driven than women with high libido’s ‘male-eaters’.

This time and again we have also seen in Bachelor Nation. In The bachelor Season 18, Clare Crawley was once a slut ashamed of a pre-fantasy suite connection. On The bachelor Season 11, Kaitlyn Bristowe was excited before sleeping with a participant before the sanctioned Canoodling episode of the show. Four seasons later, the Free Luke Parker of Hannah Brown tried to question her faith on the basis of sexual history – which immediately encouraged her viral answer: “I had sex … and Jesus still loves me.”

Really, the core of the conflict of Bettenburg and O’Brien seems to have little to do with O’Brien itself. It is Bettenburg who admits that he has not dated someone for four years and, for some reason, assuming that everyone in the pods would be just as difficult.

His previous Pod girlfriend, Molly Mullaney, apparently announced that she had ended a long-term on-and-out situation for six months before she came to the pods, and even that gave Bettenburg a break. Throwing O’Brien’s, he complains, is ‘even more recent’. What is A virtuous boy looking for a suitable bride who should do?

It does not help that the Van Bettenburg family is not on board with the engagement. They are a conservative father apparently slept in the basement during family trips to his mother-in-law’s house. It is easy to guess that a TV engagement might not be that welcome. To make matters worse, the family and friends of Bettenburg apparently found out that he was engaged before he had the chance to tell them and did not take it well.

But why does Bertenburg seem so much to keep O’Brien away from them?

In episode 9 Bettenburg cancel a visit with his own friends after drilling O’Brien for the umpteenth time, causing them to cry. In the meantime, she introduces him to her best friends. If the family of Bettenburg is so terrified that O’Brien is an attention-seeking ‘crazy’, as he says, it would not help if they would meet her and saw that she is just a chill-young woman who gives a spin class And spends her. Time to play card games?

The decency of O’Brien seems to be as worried as Bettenburg, his own decorum leaves a lot to be desired. In episode 8 he spends a whole cocktail mixer that apparently everyone quizzes about how far they went to bed. When a colleague -castmate, Taylor Haag, asks how it is about O’Brien, he answers: ‘She moves a lot at night. She pees a lot. She pees every f *** ING, like, hour. “Maybe feeling something wrong, Haag encourages him,” be nice to her. ” The bar really fell through the floor.

Even before this season premiered, viewers could see that Bettenburg would be the villain. His “joke” that because O’Brien was 30 years old, she was “no longer attractive”, was one of the most spoken times in the trailer of season 8, and his comments during the season have shown that this is indeed, his Idea of ​​humor.

When O In episode 7, when O’Brien Bettenburg asks during a wedding travel boat ride when he has seen some behavior from her, he wants to walk away, he answers: “Maybe the new hair”, before he hits his favorite voltage diffuser, “I,” I, “I:” I am kidding, “after she has made a face.

Bettenburg has already deployed the “just jokes” defense in a podcast interview with Bachelor Star and former reality -TV shur Extraordinaire Nick Viall, but the red flags go beyond a few controversial comments. His inability to let go of O’Brien’s pre-pod Fling feels particularly unfair, given how long he refused to choose between her and Mullaney. If the care is whether they are both ‘ready’ for marriage, would not struggle to choose between two people a greater care than are connected on gambling days before they leave for the longest speed marathon in the world?

Let us also not forget that when confronting his indecision in the pods, Bettenburg tried to write it off as a ‘girl’s drama’. That movement was almost as annoying as his complaint this week in episode 9 that the hook-up nonsense He and his friends Being maintaining, feels like immature ‘high school’ – to which one of the friends of O’Brien responds smoothly: “That worries me about your friends.”

Apparently nothing more is important than the feeling of moral superiority of Bettenburg. He spends episodes 7 to 9 complaining that he cannot get “past” O’Brien’s supposed indiscretion. He tortures her by supposed to share ‘facts’ that his friends presented him without ever giving her the chance to speak with those who interrogate her character. He says he can’t stand to go to sleep next to her knowing that she didn’t sleep long before this experiment next to someone else. It does not matter that she repeatedly said that she and this man never had a relationship, never led each other’s friends and never did guests.

Every time Bertenburg touches O’Brien with these allegations, he succeeds them by confirming how much he loves and admires her. Yet the feelings never seem to earn any benefit from the doubt. Can you really claim that you love someone if you refuse to trust him?

This Saga will undoubtedly spill in future episodes. At the end of episode 9 Bettenburg decides to drink with his friends instead of talking out things. How would he have responded, do I wonder if the roles have been reversed? Would it be good with O’Brien who leaves a serious conversation to go with the Gals, or would that further feed his conviction?

But again, this might be what we should expect from a man who had once conveyed a book report about it The deep red letter.