Love Is Blind’s Izzy Zapata felt all the emotions on his wedding day.
During Friday’s season 5 finale, Izzy and fiancée Stacy Snyder finally reached the altar as they decided whether to tie the knot or potentially sever ties forever. For Izzy, the answer was a resounding yes. But while he agreed to marry Stacy, she ended up turning him down, citing lack of time as their biggest issue.
Izzy said he understood her perspective and that he still loved her — the pair even shared a kiss at the altar. But while it appeared they were on good terms and potentially going to try dating again, Izzy later went off on Stacy to cameras after he finally had a moment to register his emotions.
“It’s like she’s always trying to find something wrong,” he said in a confessional interview. “It’s like all the outside s — — was getting to her, and I blocked out everything. Looks, money, drama. I just focused on her …. The whole point of this [experiment] is, Does it matter? Does a credit score matter? Does the car I drive matter? Does where I go to f — -ing dinner matter? None of that matters to me. It makes me wonder, ‘Why are you 33 and single and not married?’ I’m 29 years old and I can give you everything that a f — -ing rich, 45-year-old man that you always go for and always fail with can’t give you.”
Opening up about why he had a change of heart so quickly, Izzy, now 31, tells that his true feelings started to sink in as he was being questioned by producers.
“When we’re at the altar, I still was optimistic to things, although she’d told me no in that moment,” he explains. “I thought that we were still going to be together after the wedding, so I was like, ‘OK, we made it through this together.’”
“But I think what switched is when I had to do my interview and [was] just really reflecting back on what the hell just happened once I got pulled away,” he continues. “And so when I’m sitting there and I’m getting my questions asked to me, I’m like, ‘Damn. F — — this. This is s — -ty.’ I was so hurt that I finally just let my emotions sit in.”
Izzy says in that moment, which only happened about 20 minutes after Stacy said no at the altar, he finally decided to prioritize his own emotions.
“I was looking out more for myself at the time because I always kept prioritizing her and trying to be strong for her. And I kind of let her shove my feelings aside,” he says. “So I was like, ‘You know what? No.’ It’s not how you want to feel, and that’s why you’ll see a switch flip where it’s like, ‘Yeah, I am upset.’ I was really hurt actually.”
Izzy and Stacy’s road to the altar got off to a great start, but soon took a turn when Izzy was introduced to Stacy’s life in Houston. She began to criticize the way the sales employee lived, including his “messy” apartment, drawer of random women’s possessions, and use of paper plates.
Stacy, now 34, was also extremely concerned about Izzy’s finances and poor credit — particularly because the director of operations was accustomed to living a lavish lifestyle (as her dad put it, “sometimes love wants to fly first class”).
On their wedding day, Stacy told Izzy at the altar, “I do want you, and I want to say yes. But I would be doing you and I a disservice right now to say that ‘I do’ when I feel like there’s a lot things we need — and more than anything, we need time.”
When asked if he suspected Stacy would say no, Izzy tells he had an inkling that something was off, even though he wasn’t allowed to see her for the two days before the wedding.
“I kind of had a feeling, just kind of like a gut feeling with it,” he says. “I could tell if she was going to be any bit of uncertain, she was going to more than likely say no. I still kind of tried to keep this optimistic mindset through it, really trying to push. So I wrote the note and just kept fighting until the end. I mean, it was still very devastating at the end.”
It didn’t help that right before their wedding, Izzy and Stacy had a fateful conversation about Izzy’s credit score. Stacy struggled with the revelation, claiming Izzy was not entirely truthful about the topic and failed to mention it earlier.
“It happened right before bachelor party,” Izzy recalls, noting that he “definitely” believes the timing of the conversation may have played a factor in her wedding day decision. “I didn’t really give her enough time to marinate, let it sit and process. I felt like that kind of did have an effect on it as well.”
Despite everything that unfolded, Izzy believes they would be nearing a wedding anniversary today if Stacy had said yes at the altar.
“We had really good chemistry,” he explains. “That’s what you didn’t see too much of on camera. You kind of just see more surface-level stuff. You don’t see that bond, that emotional bond we had together.”
“I mean, still to this day we’re great friends. Just how we were then,” he adds. “So yeah, I think we would still probably be married if we were together.”
Love Is Blind season 5 is streaming in full on Netflix. The reunion episode drops Sunday at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT.
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