It’s probably for the best that Dave Bettenburg and Lauren O’Brien realized they weren’t a good match before they got to their wedding fittings in Love Is Blind season eight. While some viewers side-eyed Bettenburg from the second he started asking women in the pods what was wrong with them, O’Brien said multiple times in Honduras that the relationship with her new fiancé felt right. Ultimately, it was a guy from her past that caused the biggest problems for the couple: O’Brien maintained she had been casually hooking up with the man who was spreading rumors that the two had dated right before she left for filming, while Bettenburg’s friends and beloved sister convinced him that the guy in question — who also happened to live in the same Minneapolis apartment building the LIB couples moved into — had been seriously dating O’Brien in the weeks leading up to production.
The pair ultimately called off their engagement in this week’s drop of episodes, after Bettenburg told O’Brien that his friends and family didn’t want to meet her and that her dad wasn’t being fair for suggesting Bettenburg wasn’t ready to get engaged. O’Brien told him he was “not ready to choose someone else and be a team member with them,” then told cameras that she gave him a letter for his sister that he never delivered. Now, Bettenburg is doubling down on his claim that he did try to get his community onboard, and argues that there was no “best way” to handle the situation. He also claims he delivered O’Brien’s heartfelt letter but that his sister never told him whether she read it. “I mean, I don’t think that would change anything on her end,” he reflected. “At that time, my sister knew what she knew. And so did I.”
Have you been watching the show with your friends and family?
I watched the first drop with Devin, and then I watched the other ones just by myself. I wanted to isolate myself for it.
How do you feel watching yourself back?
Throughout the entire process, I was just myself. But watching some of the other cast members, it seems like people put on an act. They know when they’re mic’d and when they’re being filmed. I was just being me, and I feel like I did a good job of showing that side of me, whether I was mic’d or not.
Has your sister been watching the show?
Yes.
What’s the age gap there?
She’s two years older than me.
Have her opinions on Lauren and that situation changed as she’s gotten to see the process play out onscreen?
You know, the further along we get in the show, it’s hard for her to watch how difficult it was for Lauren to go through the process and see how much it was weighing on her. She obviously feels bad about that. Honestly, it’s been hard for me to relive those moments, too.
Lauren wrote a letter for you to give to your sister but said it didn’t end up getting to her. Can you walk me through your thought process behind that choice?
I mean, the letter did get to my sister. I don’t know why Lauren thought that. She said she found it in my jacket pocket. [Laughs.] I don’t know why she’s going through my jacket pocket, but that’s a different story, I guess. I gave the letter to my sister. Whether she read it or not was up to her. If she thought it was relevant at that time, that was her call.
Have you ever been in a relationship that your sister didn’t approve of?
No.
People online are reacting strongly to how much you wanted her to approve the relationship. Is that something you two often —
Oh, absolutely. Any relationship I have, I’m gonna want my sister’s approval. And the crazy thing to me is, like, that’s getting blown out of proportion. If you watch every other participant or cast member that goes through this process, family is a huge thing for them. For some reason, everyone’s just pointing at me and my sister. But everyone throughout this show has said how important family is to them, and getting their approval as well. So I don’t get why it’s just being pointed at me.
What about your friends? Have they ever disapproved of one of your past relationships?
No, not at all. My friends are very easygoing. We’re all there to support each other. Again, it just comes down to getting married in two weeks and knowing what I knew and what they knew. My friends would never lie to me just to sabotage a relationship.
So this was something you were navigating for the first time, having your community not feel good about someone you were dating.
It’s not that they ever disapproved of her as a person. They disapproved of the process. The goal was to get married in two weeks, and that was not okay with people. And it wasn’t okay with me either, to have a relationship with someone else that close to getting married. I knew the timeline going into the pods, but I didn’t know that people were having three-month relationships going into it.
Do you still feel sure that the other guy was Lauren’s boyfriend?
You know, the whole scenario just sucked in general. One thing I haven’t discussed yet that I probably should — because it’s really hard for me to sit back and watch how much hate I’m getting — is that I knew before going into the experiment that one of the girls was seeing this guy. The extent of that relationship, I still don’t know. I didn’t know her name. I didn’t know any details about who it was. I was like, hey, there’s 15 other women who are going, what are the odds? So that’s something that’s playing back in my head as I’m getting all this hate for taking a stand for myself and sticking up for myself and what I knew in that situation. I did know going into it that somebody was seeing this guy, and it just so happens that I ended up with her.
In the show, you mention finding it weird to be spending the night in bed with Lauren after she had been with this other person. Do you think you still would’ve been uncomfortable if he was just a friend with benefits, like she said?
If it was just a casual thing, I totally get that. One-night stands or little flings are very normal these days. But the information I knew at that time was that it wasn’t casual. I was told they had been dating for about three months, and that she had stayed at his place the night before we all left for the show. In my head, that timeline does not add up. It sounded like it was a full-on relationship that had zero closure, that they never even said, “This is over,” when she left. Almost like keeping the door open in case it didn’t work out.
Did you ever have a conversation with the guy in question about this?
I mean, he found me in the lobby when we moved into our shared apartment. We talked a little bit, but I wasn’t really listening to what he had to say at that moment. I guess the long answer is, no, we didn’t specifically talk about it. I just stayed away from him.
When you were explaining why you wanted to come on Love Is Blind, you said you felt like you’d been “an ass” to women and wanted to “confront” yourself about that. How successful do you feel you were in accomplishing that goal?
The person I’ve become from the process has really helped change my perspective on relationships and how I handle certain situations. I’ve come away with a lot of different traits that I didn’t necessarily have before, like being vulnerable and open and honest in communication. Not only with a future partner, but also with friends that care about my relationships and want me to be happy. Before the show, I never really talked about my feelings or how they were affecting me as a person. Those are things I’m bringing into my current life and relationships going forward.
But I’ve been struggling with the hate that I’m getting because of being open about not being perfect in relationships in the past. It’s not that I’ve treated women poorly, it was just the idea of dating with the expectation of marriage or having a very serious relationship out of it … I felt that viewers would understand and maybe be able to relate to that. Nobody’s perfect in this world. I was being honest about that from the start, but I guess nobody really cares about that.
When I hear you say all of that, it does make me wonder, wouldn’t you actually be more understanding of the idea that Lauren could’ve had a physical relationship that lasted for some time but didn’t mean much to her emotionally?
If you’re hooking up with somebody for a few months and staying at their place all the time, I just didn’t understand how you can not have any sort of emotional attachment to it. Especially that close to going into the show. Any relationship I’ve been in that’s become physical, there’s definitely an emotional connection for me, regardless. I feel like those two things are very interconnected, and for people to just treat relationships as casual like that … I’ve gone on dates where we only went on three, four, five dates, and then it ends. But I’ve never done that intentionally with the idea that, like, Hey, let’s just keep hooking up until we do something else. That just doesn’t make sense to me.
Were you celibate for the past four years that you were single?
No, I wasn’t. But I also wasn’t hooking up with somebody for months at a time before going on a show to get married.
Okay, so it sounds like you definitely still feel justified in some of your concerns and subsequent actions.
Mm-hmm.
Is there anything else you wish people knew about you or this experience?
I was really hoping viewers would have had more of an open mind watching me and understanding how difficult it was to open up and be vulnerable going into these situations and relationships. I’m being very misunderstood by a lot of people right now, and it’s very tough to deal with.