“Love Is Blind” season 5's Stacy reveals Izzy knew she wasn't going to say 'I do'
Warning: This article contains spoilers about the Love Is Blind season 5 finale.
The outcomes of both Love Is Blind season 5 weddings were shocking to viewers, but Stacy reveals that she and Izzy actually knew they weren't going to get married before filming the finale.
After their fight about Izzy's bad credit score before the wedding, Stacy knew it wasn't the right time for them to get married. But the episode didn't reveal her decision until she and Izzy were at the altar and Izzy said "I do." When it was Stacy's turn, she explained she wanted to say yes but that would do Izzy a disservice because they needed time to work on things first. He said he understood and and still loved her, and they kissed as their friends and family cheered for them.
Rebecca Brenneman Stacy Snyder, Izzy Zapata
Stacy tells EW that Izzy actually knew in advance that she wasn't going to say "I do" during their wedding. "He knew that I wasn't saying yes, and he told me that he still wanted to say yes," Stacy says. "He was worried about looking stupid or rejected up there, and I was like, 'Don't show up. I'll handle this.' It was more like he wanted everyone to know that the love was real and that he's saying, 'I'm always going to be a yes to you, even though I know you're not there.' Parts of it were sad for me, and the other parts were somewhat romantic, I guess, but it wasn't fun."
Stacy also reveals that Izzy's bad credit score wasn't the main issue — it was the fact that he waited until right before the wedding to tell her about it when she had been asking him about his finances for weeks. "It was an ongoing conversation — I was working with a therapist and an attorney [talking about how] I just met someone and I'm going to get married in a couple of weeks, how do I cover my bases?" she says. "I don't have time for premarital counseling, I've got a home and I've got assets. They were like, 'You need to have communication about finances.'"
Throughout the entire season, Stacy tried to have that conversation with Izzy, but says he kept brushing her off and skirting the issue. "It was probably every day that I'm like, 'We need to pull out all of our bank statements, our credit cards, we need to look at each other's spending if it's over a certain amount so that nothing is a surprise once we're married,'" she says. "Because I know that if I see him spend $1,000 at a bar, I'm going to be mad if I don't know that that's a regular thing, and vice versa, if I'm buying a pair of shoes or going to a nice dinner. I don't think that he understood that that was really what I wanted to go over in depth. He was just like, 'We'll talk about it another time.'"
That time finally came during their final date before the wedding, simply because the clock had run out and Izzy had to break the news to her. "At that airplane dinner, he was like, 'Is there anything holding you back before the wedding day?' And I'm like, 'Yeah, we still haven't covered that and if we don't cover it, I'm not saying yes. This is it,'" Stacy says. "And when we covered it, it wasn't great. It wasn't just the credit. I mean the credit was a shock, and I don't know why he didn't think to bring that up, because there were several times where it did come up and he just was like, 'It's fine.' I still don't really understand why he wouldn't have been like, 'I need to tell you this. I've got it covered, I paid it off, but... ' Because I just probably would've been more understanding to it. But the fact that it was hidden, I'm like, 'Why wouldn't you have told me that?'"
Courtesy of Netflix Stacy and Izzy on 'Love is Blind' season 5
On top of his credit score, Stacy also struggled with how unsettled Izzy seemed to be with his career and finances at that point in his life. "His job was brand new, it felt like he was still in training, he was 1099 contracted, he was like, 'I don't know what my income is, I'm all commission and I don't have benefits,'" she says. "I'm like, 'So if you get in a car wreck tomorrow, I am responsible for the both of us financially and paying your medical bills without insurance, and I don't have the money to do that.' It's all of these scenarios of the what ifs that you have to play in your head when you get married and join your life together. I am responsible for you, and you're responsible for me. It was shocking to me that he didn't tell me that and that he didn't think it was a big deal to go into depth as far as where he was at in his career, so we just were not on the same page as the importance of it."
But Stacy didn't decide she wasn't going to get married to him immediately after that conversation — it took about a day for the shock to wear off before she could make any decision about their future. "It put me in a state of, this is very real, this is very serious. What do I do?" she says. "Do I take a leap of faith and hope to God there is nothing else, and hope that he doesn't have anything come up medically where this could be bad for me financially? Or do I look at this as a responsible adult and take the time to see if it is or isn't a deal breaker? I didn't feel in that moment it was a no, and then slowly it was just like, I needed to have with full certainty that it was a yes for me to say yes, and I didn't have that after that conversation."
A year and a half later, Stacy was even more shocked when she watched the first few episodes of season 5 and saw that Izzy told his pod ex Johnie about his credit score during one of their early dates. "We talked about a lot of the same things that he talked about with her — his religious background, stuff with his dad, the adoption, we talked about all of those deep topics as well," she says. "I don't know how it came up with them, maybe she really went there to get the info, because we did talk about finances and I asked if he was in debt, student loans, and he said no, so I don't know why they got there and we didn't. That was the first time, watching the show, that I even knew that he disclosed it to anyone."
She adds that it was difficult to see him openly share that information with Johnie right away when she had been trying to get answers from him throughout their entire engagement. "I just don't understand that," she says. "Did something happen when you said that, that she pulled back where you were like, 'Crap, I don't want to tell Stacy that, and her pull back, too?' I don't know, but I was very surprised because then he was saying, 'I didn't tell you because there was some shame,' which makes sense, but there wasn't shame there. Or was there [with Johnie], and that's why you didn't tell me?"
Looking back on it now, Stacy isn't sure whether they'd be married if Izzy had disclosed that information to her sooner.
"Things would be different," she says. "But it was just everything, like lifestyle was kind of a question mark for me. It would've better prepared me for the other financial conversations we were having, knowing his background and where he was at, even career-wise, for me to better navigate the gender expectations. If you're just starting out and you have bad credit, what are your goals financially to get there? It's just hard to even imagine. It might've been better, it might've been worse. There were other things outside of that also that were not meshing, and that was just the straw that broke the camel's back."
Are Izzy and Stacy still together after their failed finale wedding? Find out when the Love Is Blind season 5 reunion premieres Sunday at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Netflix.
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