Love Is Blind's Joey and Sara Face the Fallout of Finding Love in the Wreckage

Reality TV has a way of turning human connection into public property—and Love Is Blind season 8 delivered a masterclass in that awkward truth. When Sara Carton and Joey Leveille revealed their romance months after the show wrapped, fans didn’t exactly send congratulations. Both had walked away from altar rejections with Monica Danús and Ben Mezzenga, respectively, and the internet was ready to assign blame.

On Wednesday, June 24, the pair opened up about the backlash during an appearance on the Table for 1 podcast, and their honesty cuts to something deeper than just celebrity gossip. Sara, 30, admitted she took the comments personally in ways that Joey, 37, handled more gracefully.“I take things personal, and that’s a pro and a con,”she explained.“I’m a very emotional person, but it took me so long to get out of [what] felt like a very deep dark hole for a little bit.”That rawness—the vulnerability that makes reality TV compelling in the first place—becomes both a strength and a wound when strangers weaponize it online.

What’s telling is the timeline they’ve maintained throughout: Joey and Sara didn’t even start talking until eight months after filming wrapped. They had that initial spark in the Love Is Blind pods, sure, but they deliberately pumped the brakes when the season was still airing. It wasn’t until both relationships had publicly imploded that they decided to explore what might be there. Still, the context barely mattered to critics who saw their connection as opportunistic or disloyal.

Joey frames their bond as rooted in what he calls“trauma-bonding”—that peculiar closeness that comes from shared chaos only they could understand.“I’m sure that’s a big part of it, like, you experience something that no one else really knows,”he said.“And we were both kind of there for each other through really tough [times], so that emotional support was a huge thing.”It’s a fair observation. Reality TV puts people through an emotional gauntlet that nobody outside that experience can truly comprehend, and sometimes the person standing next to you through the fire is exactly who you need.

But here’s the thing: Love Is Blind puts people in an impossible position. They’re asked to fall for strangers sight unseen, then broadcast their most vulnerable moments to millions. When it fails—as it often does—those same people are expected to disappear, grieve privately, and certainly not pursue romance with anyone connected to the show. Sara and Joey broke that unwritten rule, and the internet made sure they knew it. What makes their story worth following isn’t the scandal, though. It’s watching two people try to build something real after being picked apart by strangers. That’s harder than any pod proposal.