Love Is Blind ‘s Micah and Irina say being mean girls during the pods was a ‘coping mechanism’

Warning: This article contains spoilers about Love Is Blind season 4, episodes 1-5.

Love Is Blind has always been messy, but season 4 takes the mess to a whole new level.

Netflix’s reality dating series is back, this time with a group of Seattle singles hoping to find love “sight unseen” (the first five episodes are now streaming). Five couples ended up leaving the pods engaged, but some of the wildest drama during the time in pods actually had nothing to do with that. And that’s because Love Is Blind officially has its first reality TV villains.

Sure, this show has had contestants with villainous traits in the past, but Irina, 26, and Micah, 27, are like nothing we’ve ever seen before. These two became instant BFFs after meeting in the pod living quarters — which isn’t surprising, since the contestants have no one else but each other to talk to during their down time. Of course they’re going to bond! But the foundation of Irina and Micah’s friendship is built on mean girl energy — they gossip to each other making fun of the other women. When they see another woman crying after getting dumped in the pods, they eavesdrop and laugh at her misery. When Irina learns she’s competing for Zack’s affections with another woman named Bliss, she tells Zack that Bliss has been treating her horribly when, it fact, it’s the other way around (Zack believes Irina’s lies and ultimately dumps Bliss for her, only to quickly realize his mistake when they leave the pods and go to Mexico. When Zack and Irina break up, he immediately tries to win back Bliss).

On the show, Micah and Irina act as if they DGAF about anyone else but themselves. But do they still feel that way now? When EW spoke with both women ahead of the season 4 premiere, they had yet to see any episodes. Micah admits it’s “nerve-wracking” knowing everyone is going to see what happened, but defends their actions by saying they were simply a “coping mechanism” at the time.

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“For us, it was really helpful to have a little sense of normalcy,” Micah says. “Being able to laugh and make light and make jokes and, well, maybe sometimes the jokes didn’t land or maybe it didn’t look the best, but we needed that in that moment to feel like a normal person. Because you’re a part of this experience that is so beyond words. To be able to make a little bit of light out of such a hard thing was really helpful.”

Love is Blind

Netflix Micah

Micah adds that she and Irina are “just people. [She] and I are both in our mid-twenties. We’re just doing the best we can do. We just have to grow up from our mistakes.”

Irina says that she was “in her own lane” during that time in the pods. “Everything was difficult. Everyone was experiencing the whole show in a different way,” she says. “Me and Micah’s coping mechanism was laughing about it. And I honestly will say on the record, 100 percent, I did not intentionally ever want to hurt anyone. [Hearing] that I hurt people’s feelings genuinely breaks my heart.”

She continues, “I know there probably have to be some bridges that I’ll have to mend and conversations I’ll have to have, that I want to have. But I think, for me, in the experience I was kind of zoned out and in my own thing of how I’m feeling, and I didn’t really realize how that could affect other people. With Micah, we were laughing because, yes, it was very serious and it was very intense and it was very hard, so I don’t want to brush it off and say that we weren’t taking it seriously. It’s just more our perspective, that’s how we coped about it; we laughed and made the best out of it. We didn’t intend to be mean or intentionally hurt anybody at all. That does honestly hurt me, hearing that, and I hope I can have some conversations to fix that later.”

Love is Blind

Netflix Irina

Irina is “100 percent” nervous about the backlash she and Micah might receive now that the season has premiered. “But also, this is one month of my life,” she says. “I do believe that I was myself. I maybe wasn’t my best self throughout the whole entire show, and I just think I had to do what was best for me, and I will stand by that. But yeah, I guess I don’t exactly know what scenes they’re going to show, or maybe there’ll be a mirror shoved in my face in the sense of I didn’t realize I hurt this person or what I’ve done.”

There is one moment she definitely regrets: flirting with Micah’s fiancé Paul during the pool party in Mexico. “Flirting with Paul in the pool, that was not who I am. That’s not my character,” Irina says. “I had too much alcohol and, yes, Paul was someone that I felt in energy with, but it was something I never wanted to pursue and haven’t pursued and won’t pursue. It was more in the sense of realizing the connection I had with him, I want that with my future husband. And I didn’t have that with Zack.”

While Irina was into Zack in the pods, as soon as she saw him in person after they were engaged, their relationship went into a nosedive. She refused to be physically intimate with him, visibly cringing away when he tried to hug or kiss her, and just iced him out until he pulled the plug on their last night in Mexico. But according to Irina, she was “pushing to have that” connection with Zack and “trying so hard, but it just wasn’t there.”

Love is Blind

Netflix Micah and Irina

“That made me be like, ‘I want this with my husband and I don’t have it,'” Irina says. “And I obviously regret that was my best friend’s [fiancé]. There’s a bigger picture and life is bigger than just this one month that we’d been filmed.”

So was Irina ever actually in love with Zack after the pods? Or was it over the moment she saw him? “I would say there was a little bit of a buildup,” she says. “I feel like in the pods, all our conversations, we had some laughs here and there, but it was more serious, talking about trauma and life. He was by far the best person that I met in there when I was talking to him. When we met each other, instantly, it wasn’t anything about his appearance, it was more like this gut feeling. I knew it was going to be hard for me. I knew I was going to have a hard time adjusting to it.”

Irina continues, “I remember telling him, ‘I’m probably not going to kiss you and I don’t want to have sex before marriage,’ all of that. But I didn’t realize exactly how hard it would be and how I knew it would take some time, but it didn’t. I just had this initial gut feeling that I didn’t feel comfortable or safe around him, and I couldn’t get past it. I kept saying, ‘I want to be friends with him. I’m going to try to have a friendship with him and maybe if we build this friendship then the intimacy and everything will grow,’ but it just never did.”

Love Is Blind season 4 debuts new episodes Fridays on Netflix.

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