Love Is Blind's Aaliyah Reveals Her Take on Uche and His Ex - and If She Thinks They Plotted Together

Love Is Blind’s Aaliyah Cosby is providing her two cents on the drama involving Uche Okoroha and Lydia Velez Gonzalez.

In the first batch of episodes, which were released on Netflix last Friday, fans learned that Uche, 34, and Lydia, 32, previously dated before coming on the show. The revelation was particularly shocking to Aaliyah, who had been connecting with Uche in the pods and also forming a close friendship with Lydia in the women’s quarters.

In the new episodes, it was finally revealed that Aaliyah, 29, left the experiment right before Uche was going to propose because she had enough of Lydia’s commentary about Uche, and she had an off-camera exchange with Lydia that ultimately set her off. Uche was heartbroken by her sudden exit and tried to convince Aaliyah to give them another chance, but she shut him down.

Later, the pair met up over lunch and discussed everything that had unfolded. This time, Aaliyah was ready to give things a second try, but Uche was the one who rejected the offer, citing his frustrations with Aaliyah’s inconsistencies and up-and-down behavior after the experiment.

“You didn’t have confidence in me and you didn’t have confidence in our relationship,” he said during episode 7. “I think it’s over between us.”

During that same conversation, Aaliyah admitted to Uche that she was “questioning” whether he and Lydia had “planned to be here together.” Though Uche denied it at the time, Aaliyah is now opening up about whether she feels his response was genuine.

“At this point, I am really unsure on a lot, but I just hope that they both are in a better place because I feel like there’s a lot that they had experienced prior to the show that just didn’t really have much to do with me,” she says of Uche and Lydia. “I think that’s for them to kind of share with people if they choose to. But I feel at peace with it now.”

“For a while it was kind of difficult for me to navigate my feelings, but I’m not really sure,” she adds. “I don’t know. Maybe they can kind of speak to it more and then we can all get our closure together on that and get our answers together.”

Reflecting on her own journey on the show, Aaliyah admits that her exit may have come off as sudden, but it was something she thought long and hard about.

“I considered a lot of different things when it came to my situation. I was very analytical,” she explains. “I had to kind of take my emotion out of it when it came to certain aspects and points along that journey for me. My conversation with her, my conversation with him, when I had time to myself to just process, it was tough.”

“I ultimately just felt like I had to do what was best for me in the end,” the ICU travel nurse continues. “Marriage is such a huge step. It’s very sacred and it’s something that I take very seriously and I just wanted to really enjoy that moment. I was like, ‘If I’m going to be engaged once and marry once, because that’s my goal, I want to be happy and enjoy it and be at peace.’ So it’s just one of those things where I felt like I had to do what was best for me and really follow my intuition.”

Asked whether she thinks Uche would’ve left the show with her after expressing her desire to leave, Aaliyah says, “I don’t think so. It’s hard to say now, but I don’t think he would’ve. Honestly, I think he probably would’ve stayed, but I think that might be a better question for him.”

Following her exit, Aaliyah says she agreed to meet up with Uche because “he deserved that in the end.”

“If he had any feelings that he wanted to express or if there were things that were just left open-ended, we needed to have that closure,” she explains. “If we were going to have that, if we were going to continue on, we could put all of our cards on the table and really give each other that moment to say, ‘Look, this is where I was emotionally. This is how I felt.’ And same for him. So I felt like it was only fair that we have a conversation and we really speak and be open about where we were emotionally.”

Now that the two have gotten their closure, Aaliyah says she’s on good terms with both Uche and Lydia — and more importantly, focused on moving forward.

“I am in a good place. I respect them both as people,” she says. “I think that we all want one another to be happy, and I am most definitely living my best life. I’m happy.”

Episodes 1–7 of Love Is Blind season 5 are currently streaming on Netflix. The next batch of episodes will drop on Friday.