"Love is Blind" Awards

PRESENTED BY ANNA CLAYWELL AND ELIZABETH FRANKLIN

"LOVE IS BLIND" AWARDS

Go!

To no one’s surprise, but everyone’s delight, Tiffany Pennywell and Brett Brown both said “I do” on their wedding day. The first couple shown to get engaged this season also took the lead for the favorite couple for fans, ourselves included. With support coming from each party’s family and friends, emotional and financial security, and their maturity, it seemed that their connection seamlessly transitioned itself from the pods to real life.

We were both incredibly surprised when both Kwame Appiah and Chelsea Griffin both made it to the altar and were married. In the pods, Griffin was Appiah’s so-called “second choice” after fellow contestant Micah Lussier, but they seemed to match each other’s extroverted, social-butterfly energy. When they finally met in person in Mexico, their relationship was made rocky by Appiah and Lussier’s flirting and the apparent inability to agree on day-to-day activities. In any case, we’re happy for the both of them and hope that they can learn to make compromises and stick it out over time.

For someone who described his type as “witchy” and “granola” girls, Micah Lussier certainly was not what Paul Peden described himself going for in the “real world.” Both Lussier and Peden had strong connections to other people in the pods, Lussier with Kwame Appiah and Peden with Amber Wilder but eventually gave up those connections to get engaged to each other. Making it to the altar, when being asked to say “I do,” Lussier flipped the script and asked Peden to answer first. His answer proved that, at least in their case, opposites don’t attract, as he answered with an “I don’t.”

What most likely started as a nightmare for contestant Bliss Poureetezadi ended in a fairytale wedding with her soon-to-be husband, Zack Goytowski. Unlike the rest of the couples, Goytowski initially rejected Poureetezadi in the pods to be with Irina Solomonova. However, Goytowski realized his mistake and found that he was much more compatible with Poureetezadi. In the pods, Goytowski and Poureetezadi had connected well, with each of them discovering that the other had changed them for the better. Despite the rocky start and the initial rejection looming in the air, for the first time in “Love is Blind” history, a couple who had not been engaged in the pods were married, which certainly “redeemed” their relationship for us.

You would be hard-pressed to find a more awkward scene then the one of Zack Goytowski and Irina Solomonova meeting for the first time after getting engaged. After Solomonova somewhat “battled” castmate Bliss Poureetezadi for Goytowski’s hand in marriage, Solomonova won — at first. But after their first meeting, where Solomonova said Goytowski looked like a cartoon character, and that he never seemed to blink, it was more than blatantly obvious they weren’t going to work out. The couple ended it on their trip to Mexico, and while Solomonova came out of this as one of this season’s “villians,” she at least made it clear that Gowtowski should pursue the other woman he broke up with in the pods, Poureetezadi.

Jackelina “Jackie” Bond and Marshall Glaze didn’t even make it to the altar, which was probably for the best. In the pods, they seemed very sweet and extremely interested in each other, and we had been rooting for them from the start. However, after a brief honeymoon phase, their relationship abruptly took a sharp, left turn. Instead of the sweet gestures and playful conversations that we were used to, we were bewildered by the fight that led to their break-up, which apparently included Glaze storming out of their shared apartment for three days, and Bonds urging him to be more “aggressive” in their intimate life. Bond’s somewhat offensive leaked texts about Glaze also didn’t help any, and cemented that this relationship wasn’t meant to last.