🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

Nancy Rodriguez never really expected to get married. “I thought, ‘Oh, I’d find somebody, we would live happily ever after.’ But I’d be cool without a wedding,” she tells Tudum. Then Nancy found herself on Love Is Blind Season 3, about to marry pod fiancé Bartise Bowden — a month after seeing him for the first time. 

While the fact that she was getting married at all was bewildering enough, the real shocker was the wedding ceremony itself. Before heading to the altar, Nancy sends Bartise a thoughtful letter and a series of gifts inspired by their love story. He returns the gesture with a shot of tequila and a succinct note that reads: “Let’s do the damn thing.” While their turbulent relationship had, until then, reached multiple potential breaking points — Bartise expresses more physical attraction to Raven and tells Nancy that she isn’t his usual “type”; he shares his oppositional views on abortion, including the belief it’s something you can only get “one pass” for — they seem to have made it to the finish line with love for one another. But then Bartise says “no” at the altar. A year and a half later, Nancy is “thankful” he did.

“He saved me the turmoil of going through a relationship where I’d get a half-assed man as a husband,” she says the day after filming the Season 3 reunion.

The Most Dramatic Moments from Love Is Blind Season 3

Nancy is now 32 years old, and is a speech pathologist who invests in multiple real estate properties. In the aftermath of her relationship with Bartise, she’s become an unexpected champion of women’s rights, and a model for navigating tough conversations. But she “absolutely” never imagined, when she signed up for Love Is Blind, that she would ever speak about a highly sensitive topic such as abortion on-camera. As a Catholic Mexican-American from a conservative Texas town, she says that “sex, abortion, your body, your period — all of those things were not on the table” to discuss even with close family members, let alone on the global stage. But she gained a new perspective on bodily autonomy after moving to San Francisco for graduate school and donating her eggs. Her years working in speech pathology with children with “medically fragile diagnoses” also influenced her outlook. 

“The pain that I felt, absorbing the trauma that these children and their families went through –– my first year, I’d take that home and cry,” she reflects. “If I had to take a bullet for my child, or jump in front of a car for my child, I would. My belief comes from the fact that I don’t want my child to suffer in this world.” 

Bartise & Nancy End Their Relationship | Love Is Blind S3E11How can you flip the script so fast like that?

So, when the subject of genetic testing came up that fateful day with her fiancé, Nancy was ready to talk. She wasn’t particularly surprised that Bartise would want to keep a pregnancy no matter the medical diagnosis. “I told him, ‘It’s not me just having a baby for me, it’s me and my partner.’ So if my [future] husband and I need to have conversations or we have a difference of opinion, we will cross that bridge,” she says. What hurts the most now is that she feels Bartise used her opinions “against her” to avoid marriage. 

“That’s what really broke my heart rewatching [the season] — that his reasons for saying no were opinions of mine or things that I could control,” she says. “I think we had enough love. I just think that he wasn’t ready.” 

Nancy points to her first meeting with Bartise’s family as evidence. In Episode 7, Bartise reveals Nancy’s views on abortion to his parents and his sister Amalia, pushing his fiancée to defend herself to her prospective in-laws. “I was shocked that this was something that he brought up in our first meeting with his parents,” she says, explaining that she had no idea abortion would be discussed that evening. Instead, Nancy says she had previously pulled Bartise aside when cameras were gone to have other difficult conversations; she felt the same courtesy could’ve been shown to her for such a high stakes family meeting.

“That meet-and-greet with his family felt strategic,” Nancy says. “It felt like, ‘My parents are going to see this amazing girl. I know she’s an amazing girl, but she’s physically not who I want. So what can I find to try to say, well this happened?’ ” 

Despite her surprise over the unexpected moment, Nancy feels “empowered” to have her views now air in a post-Roe world (Season 3 initially filmed in 2021). “That’s a problem in today’s society with our rights and our bodies: Who are you to say what to do with them and how to calculate the percentages of my body?” she says. “If there’s anyone else out there thinking, ‘What are my options, what should I do?’ It needs to be an open topic of conversation. We need to be putting it on the table, and not just abortion. It’s about a woman and her body.” 

Nancy is feeling equally enlightened about her relationship with Bartise, which concludes in Episode 11. Two weeks before the wedding, Nancy told Bartise she would say no on their wedding day — that she didn’t “trust” him anymore. But, he asked to use the remaining time to prove his intentions through actions. He promised to fight for her, and he seemingly did. And so, Nancy was “confident” Bartise would say yes at the altar, and even had her bridesmaids learn a choreographed dance (with costumes) for the reception. 

“When he said no, my heart crushed and I needed to have enough of a heartbeat to walk to the end of the aisle,” she says. “I had to shut down. I had to flip the switch because my brother and my mom, they were going to fight something that I couldn’t fight in that moment. I just couldn’t.” 

Yet, Nancy hasn’t lost her self-confidence. She still wishes she had “trusted her gut” sooner, but has gained more belief in herself in the months since the wedding day. She’s spent the time since filming focusing on herself: She weight lifts now; she travels often; and, she bought more properties to add to her already extensive portfolio. Today she’s wearing a pink two-piece that would make Elle Woods green with envy. 

“I was already a complete, whole woman before coming onto this experiment. So when I fell in love, Bartise did not take away from the love I already had for myself,” she says. “Even watching him berate me and talk about the fact that I’m not his type — it hurt, naturally, because I’m a woman. But it didn’t break me. My foundation was still there. I know who I am.” 

Yet, maybe Love Is Blind changed her a little bit. The woman who never needed to get married doesn’t sound so sure anymore. “Maybe one day I’ll be able to show that wedding choreography to my next husband,” Nancy concludes. “Who will be the real one.”

Love Is Blind Season 3 Love Triangles ExplainedGot a calculator? Let's do the math on Love is Blind Season 3's love triangles.