Love Is Blind has been the nation’s obsession since it dropped on Netflix last month, with fans desperate to know more about our pod-dating couples.
Creator Chris Coelen has teased there’s “hundreds of hours” of footage that never made the cut – and while there’s several lost dates in the pods that viewers never saw, it turns out there’s a whole secret friendship that was also overlooked.
Love Is Blind favourite Jessica Batten has now revealed that she knew co-star Kelly Chase for ten years.
In a now-deleted Instagram story, Jessica shared a throwback picture of herself with her arm around Kelly as they both posed in bikinis.
“I’ve known Kel for 10 years!” she wrote, before adding on social media, “Jessica and I actually met 10 or 11 years ago from an ex-boyfriend’s same social circle.”
While their secret friendship may have shaken fans, the news is less ground-breaking than you’d first expect.
All 30 participants in Love Is Blind were living in Atlanta, Georgia, at the time of filming, in order to give the relationships the best chance of success – so it seems only natural for some of the cast to have crossed paths before.
Unfortunately, Love Is Blind’s ‘social experiment’ didn’t work out for either Jessica or Kelly.
While Jessica found love in the pods with Mark Cuevas, she failed to see beyond their ten year age difference, and ended up leaving him at the altar on their wedding day.
Kelly was the real surprise of the series – while she seemed head over heels for her partner Kenny Barnes, she stunned everyone by turning him down at the last second.
Jessica has gone on to compare Love Is Blind to ‘psychological warfare’.
“Planning a wedding is stressful enough,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “But when you’re planning a wedding with someone that I knew I didn’t want to marry him, we weren’t ready for that, and we actually had multiple conversations and we were both on the same page about that.
“It was psychological warfare, for sure.”
Love Is Blind is available to stream on Netflix
