When Netflix’s Love Is Blind marriage experiment ended, six couples walked away engaged – or at least that’s what viewers saw in the first batch of episodes that were released earlier this month.
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In addition to the engagements of Amber and Barnett, Cameron and Lauren, Carlton and Diamond, Damian and Giannina, Jessica and Mark, and Kelly and Kenny, Rory Newbrough asked Danielle Drouin to marry him, while Westly Baer proposed to Lexie Skipper. However, when it came time for the engaged couples to leave for Mexico, producers told Newbrough and Baer that they didn’t have the resources to continue filming their love stories.
“As we were preparing to go to the Mexico trip, the leads of the show came in and said, ‘Hey, we were expecting maybe one or two [engagements]. The shows we’ve done before, we’ve never had this much success. We prepared for five. Then we got eight engagements, so we had to pick who we were going to follow,’” Newbrough told PEOPLE. “We got our phones back. They thanked us graciously and said, ‘Sorry, we just don’t have enough to cover everybody.’”
Baer and Skipper also found themselves in the same situation.
“I didn’t know why,” he said, referring to the producer’s decision. “I believe one person said, ‘We don’t want to mess up your relationship.’ It was a bummer. We were both like, “We cannot wait for this trip. It’s going to be amazing.’ And then, the next day [we were told], ‘Unfortunately we can’t follow your journey.’ I don’t know the reasoning, but I’m glad I was able to connect with somebody, at least.”
A representative for Love Is Blind told PEOPLE that the decision “truly boiled down to bandwidth” as they “did not anticipate such success,” and choosing the couples to follow post-engagement were almost random. “They practically picked names out of a hat because it was hard to predict what the outcomes would be for anyone,” the rep said.
Despite dating for three months and now living in apartment buildings right next to each other in New York City, Baer and Skipper are no longer together.
As for Rory and Danielle, the pair continued dating after returning to Atlanta, but things fizzled out shortly after. “When we got back there was still some unresolved feelings on her side for another castmate, Matt,” Newbrough reveals. “She ended up wanting to pursue that.”
Love Is Blind is streaming now on Netflix, and the tell-all reunion special will be available to stream via YouTube next Thursday, March 5.