Photo: COURTESY OF NETFLIX

When they first left the pods and began their honeymoon, Marissa George and Ramses Prashad seemed like one of the few surefire couples destined to make it to the altar on Love is blind season seven. Their energy was contagious, they looked cute next to each other and they both reported that the sex was great. But just days before the wedding, their relationship ended in an abrupt and painful breakup – a split that George says was largely one-sided.

The cracks had been visible for weeks. George and Prashad fell out over the military, birth control and family planning, and in recent episodes he seemed apathetic at best about wedding details. Prashad expressed concern when George was unable to be physically intimate due to illness she found it concerning that his response to her PMS and vitamin D deficiency was to worry about sex. George’s friends and mother didn’t seem wild about the competition either, which only further fueled viewers’ doubts.

As with much of this season Love is blindwhich directly caused the end of Maramses (Ramrissa?) seemed to happen off-screen. One minute they were on a boat talking about his apparent disinterest in buying flowers for her mother, and the next minute they were in their apartment crying over a breakup. To get to the bottom of what exactly happened, I went straight to the source: George himself.

What caused the break? Did it come from a larger conversation, or did Ramses bring it up out of nowhere?
I was quite blindsided by the level of doubt and uncertainty he felt. Before that, our hardest day was talking about a conversation he had with a family friend about how his last marriage ended and how his ex-wife dealt with it. When that was brought to my attention, I had a feeling it would lead to a problem, but I didn’t think we would break up. I just thought, Okay, he’s very sad about this. He feels things very deeply.

So leading up to this conversation I was like, “Hey, I feel like something’s not right.” I feel like that’s very typical of a man and a woman in a relationship: the man starts acting differently, and I have to come in and say, “Hey, what’s going on?” Then he said, “Yes, I have doubts.” I don’t know if he would ever bring it up otherwise.

Who were you able to meet from Ramses’ circle? We didn’t see any of that on screen.
I met his mom on FaceTime, and she was nice. She is very beautiful and very kind. I met his brother and his niece, and then I met his best friend, David, who was at the tuxedo fitting. And I also met two of his good girlfriends – girls who are friends, not ex-girlfriends. Those meetings went very well. They talked a lot about how, yes, they noticed a difference in our energy, but they felt it was very complementary. And Ramses was so sure he couldn’t remember, right? It didn’t seem like any of his friends had asked him that. I think his brother might have, but that was the day before the breakup.

That’s so shocking.
It was So shocking! I’m not going to lie. If he had told me throughout the whole process, “Oh yeah, I love you, honey, but there are some things we need to figure out before I move forward,” that would have helped with the breakup. But when someone looks at you every day, several times a day, and says, “I’m 100 percent for it,” it’s shocking to suddenly hear, “Not only do I no longer want to marry you, – I don’t want to marry you anymore.” you go out. I don’t want to do anything anymore.”

At that moment you feel like your world has been turned upside down. You think, “Am I crazy?”

As a viewer, that conversation brought up a lot of retrospective moments, like when you brought up wedding planning and he seemed apathetic. Did the breakup recontextualize anything you had initially pushed aside?
Yeah, when I watched it back, I definitely saw Ramses slipping away. I noticed that in his lack of enthusiasm. At first he said, ‘I want to be involved in it all,’ and by the end I was doing everything. And it wasn’t like I had all this free time to do it, but I thought, “If I don’t do it, who’s going to do it?” He wasn’t answering emails about wedding planning, so I thought, “Okay, I guess while I’m in class, I’ll go through my emails here and answer things and figure things out.”

At that point I put things aside because I took him at face value. I say, ‘Hey, if you have any doubts, let’s talk about it. If you do, that’s okay. It won’t end in a breakup, but we can talk about it.’ And if he says, “No, no doubt, no doubt,” what should I do? Look at him and say, “Well, you’re lying?”

I guess in retrospect I could have said, “Well, I know you say you have no doubts, but you don’t really show up like this.” But I also think, “This is part of the experiment. He’s overwhelmed and stressed about filming and all the moving pieces. I just felt like I had to step up and help him get there.

After the breakup, you called your mother to talk about it. What did she say to you when you told her the wedding was off?
Oh, she was actually quite devastated with me, just because I was devastated. When I called her, she was about an hour away from me and Ramses because the wedding was in a few days and she was driving up to spend the night. Her first reaction was, “Okay, let me talk to him then.” And I was like, “No, you’re going to fucking cuss him out!”

But in reality, she went to talk to him privately off camera and said, ‘Please don’t do this to my daughter. You clearly love each other. What’s going on?” I’m just trying to get him to see reason – that it’s scary, but we could do this. Her reaction was actually very different than I thought it would be.

So to confirm, that breakup was a complete breakup – and not just postponing the wedding?
It was a complete split. I gave him the option because he kept saying, ‘I love you. I want to be with you. My heart wants to be with you, but I have to be logical here – I can’t follow my emotions. I was like, ‘Okay, let’s be logical. We don’t have to do the marriage. We could just stay involved.” Or: ‘We don’t have to stay involved. We could just date.” And honestly, I didn’t really want to break up. But I was willing to meet him in a place where he never wanted to meet me. He had already made his decision. I really had no say in this breakup.

This lack of room for discussion reminds me of Ramesses’ seemingly uncompromising opposition to condoms. What did you think of that resistance, and were you ultimately able to find a solution?
We decided to continue what we were doing, which was tracking my menstrual cycle, and we made sure to be careful during my ovulation – using a condom or abstaining. We were talking about vasectomy. He basically said, ‘Wow, I have to think about that. Most men don’t have to think about that.” It was pretty much about this privilege that he never had to think about it.

I knew it was bad at the time, but when I looked at it from behind, I literally said, “Wear a condom or accept the consequences,” and he didn’t want that either. Looking back I think: Okay, if I got pregnant, would it be ‘my fault’? Would he have said, “Well, I told you I don’t want to have children”? Don’t know.

From what we saw, it looked like you were in an impossible situation.
It did, right? For example, we still didn’t use condoms, and again, that was because I was willing to accept the consequences of not using protection. In that sense I was naive. Now that I’m dealing with some of my people-pleasing, compromising tendencies, I would have said, ‘If you’re not willing to have a child in the next year, then we’ll use condoms, otherwise we’ll not.’ have sex.”

What did your friends say when you told them that you and Ramses had broken up?
Frankly, they were furious. I mean, they still are to this day. I think they already made concessions for them, by allowing this person into their lives as my future husband. They didn’t like how judgmental he was about divorce and the military, but they also liked seeing us together. They said they saw the love between us, and they saw how much I was in love and how much he loved me, so they supported it. But once we broke up, they were furious about how it came about. They hated that aspect, and they hated how much it broke me, so they hate that man.

I will say: I watch a lot of dating shows, and this breakup is one of the most painful I’ve ever seen. How did you cure yourself of it?
It’s probably the most heartbroken I’ve ever felt. I don’t really remember much about the two days after the breakup. I cried a lot. To be honest, I couldn’t talk. I didn’t really want to exist, and I felt that way, not because Ramses and I weren’t together – that obviously hurt and devastated me – but my brain shut down because I couldn’t understand how I wasn’t seeing it. coming. I felt very stupid and very stupid. It made me question everything I’ve been working on in therapy for years.

I would say it probably took about six months for me to finally feel like a normal person again. I had to stop drinking. I drank a lot, went out a lot and my behavior was quite reckless. And I recognized that and took a break from all that. Of course I went to therapy. And I surrounded myself with my friends and family. That’s how I dealt with it.