When Love Is Blind Season 9 singles Patrick and Kacie lay eyes on each other, sure, there’s a little clumsiness. He asks if her blonde hair is a “balayage,” and she admits, while kissing him on the couch, “I’m so nervous.” But that’s to be expected when meeting your fiancé for the first time, as both choose to move forward as an engaged couple.
Except, when they reunite in their hotel lobby shortly after the big reveal, the mood has clearly shifted. With her highlighted hair up in a messy bun, Kacie tearfully tells Patrick she needs to exit the experiment over concerns about their connection and return home to Denver.
So what exactly happened before the intense conversation? Read on to hear from both Kacie and Patrick about their time in the pods, including their perspectives on that deep discussion about race, how they really felt during the reveal, and what led to the breakdown of their relationship.
Heading into the experiment, Kacie had high hopes of meeting her husband. Eager to put a recent relationship that ended with infidelity in the rearview, she was seeking a connection beyond just the “surface level.” Right away, she knew it would be with Patrick. “I gravitated towards him because he did seem so full of life and well-rounded,” she tells Tudum. “[He] wanted to take care of me and see the world with me and do activities. I'm very go, go, go, and he seemed down.”
Not knowing much about the Love Is Blind process before entering the pods, Patrick, on the other hand, was “skeptical” about how this would all work. But he quickly saw “green flags” when talking to Kacie. On their very first date, she chatted about having family that lives in South Korea, which piqued Patrick’s interest and demonstrated that she was curious about other cultures.
A few dates in, that subject resurfaces. After exchanging some flirtatious banter, Kacie asks Patrick about the importance of physical attraction in a romantic relationship. He opens up about not being accepted because of his ethnicity and feeling insecure that his parents weren’t from America growing up. Kacie then asks if he wants to share his ethnicity and Patrick seems extremely reluctant. After nervously rifling through his journal, he reveals that he is Chinese and Cambodian.
Despite his reticence, Patrick says he wasn’t taken off guard by the line of questioning. “I did what I wanted to do,” he says. “If I was going to ask someone to marry me, I was going to let them know that I was Asian.” Patrick says he always intended to discuss such a significant part of his identity in the pods, especially as his connections strengthened. “I probably came off insecure, but I was just trying to do it correctly. I felt a little guilty for not explaining my ethnicity off the bat,” he adds. “It was bottling up, and then I realized, in order for this to really work out, I had to be really upfront and honest about everything.”
Kacie, meanwhile, could sense that something important was weighing on Patrick, which is why she pushed him to express himself. “It’s such a huge part of him. That’s his family, and I was really intrigued by his background and how he grew up. I really wanted to respect how he was feeling and the emotions he’s gone through,” she says. “Race is obviously a hot topic. I just wanted to make sure he felt comfortable and [understood] that it was not going to be a problem in my world at all. I was falling in love with that part of him, too.”
After Patrick’s other connection, Anna, unexpectedly exits the experiment early, he’s even more determined to continue exploring a relationship with Kacie. A few dates later, he gets down on one knee and delivers an extraordinarily sweet proposal speech, which Kacie now says will be nearly impossible for any other man to beat. And then, they finally meet.
In the pods, Kacie felt like she already knew Patrick really well. But that feeling didn’t last. “He did feel like more of a stranger to me,” she says. And with some reflection, it hit her that she was going to need more time. “If we had any shot of it actually working out, I needed to do it off camera and wanted to date him slowly at our pace at home in Denver,” she explains. “It was hard. I remember being very emotional about it, and I felt bad.”
When he met her in the hotel lobby a little while later, Patrick approached the conversation with “ultimate trust.” “At this point, I don’t really have anyone else there, it’s just me and her in our own world, so I’m just leaning into what she wants to do. She told me that she wanted to go back home and try it out there. I can't talk her into staying, so I just trusted her,” he says. “I’m not even thinking that she’s breaking up with me, really. I didn't really know that's what was happening.”
Kacie, however, maintains that the conversation wasn’t a breakup. “I really wanted to talk to him more, pursue going on dates, and get to know each other on a more physical level to see if this was really real,” she explains. Even though she had bonded so deeply with Patrick inside the pods, bringing that reality into the outside world was mind-bending. “I'll never be able to explain the feeling of, you think you're really in love with this person, and then you meet them, and you're like, ‘Oh wow, I actually don't know this person.’ I did crash out a little.”
Though he had every intention of taking Kacie at her word, Patrick admits that their hotel meetup worried him, especially because it happened so quickly after they first saw each other. “Immediately, my guard is going up. I'm still trying to process the emotions of the reveal. I felt like it went good, and I'm going to sleep that night thinking we’re going to Mexico, and for her to say she wanted to go back home, that definitely raised an initial red flag. I was trying to hide a lot of the emotions.”
Given Kacie’s admission on-camera saying, “I just, unfortunately, don’t think my attraction to him is going to grow that much,” it makes sense to think that her decision to leave was based purely on Patrick’s appearance. But she insists that’s not the case. “He’s a handsome guy,” she says. “It was more about him being a stranger in my arms than it was what he looks like.”
Their time in the experiment may not have ended the way he imagined, but Patrick still remains grateful for the lessons he’s taking with him. “It definitely cleaned up a lot of insecurities,” he says. “I wouldn’t have [done that] without Kacie. Going through the reveal really helped me break free from everything that I've been dealing with for many, many years.”
Kacie doesn’t have any regrets, but she says she still wonders what would have happened if she had stuck around and gone to Baja with Patrick and the other couples. “I’m very happy I accepted the proposal,” she explains. “I just felt like I had to stay true to exactly how I was feeling at the time. I never lied to Patrick about how I was feeling. I am proud of myself for being very honest, not going somewhere and acting some way just to basically remain on a TV show.”
