‘Love is Blind’ Season 11 contestant Jacqueline “Jax” Guelli is expressing regret over her decision to walk out on her fiancé Scott “Stew” Stewart upon seeing his face for the first time.
The absolutely cringe scene played out during Episode 4, shortly after Jax and Stew became engaged in the pods. They had formed a connection over their shared love of luxury and “The Phantom of the Opera.” As they continued to build their bond in the pods, Stew proposed and Jax wholeheartedly accepted. However, things took a turn when they met for the first time face-to-face.
As they approached each other for the first time, Jax, 29, was visibly awkward and told her new fiancé that the situation was “so weird” a whopping seven times. While chatting with each other, 34-year-old Stew revealed that the other men in the pods gave him the nickname of “Kennedy” because of his resemblance to the men in the Kennedy family, to which Jax responded, “More like Mitt Romney.”
Jax continued to steer clear of conversations about marrying Stew– despite the fact that they got engaged minutes before– and was visibly grossed out when he mentioned that “the only thing more cut than that diamond” was him.
Stew, however, had no inkling of doubt and assured his fiancée that there’s “no better couple” than them.
“All I can say is like, ‘Holy s**t, this might actually work,’” he said in a confessional. “… [She’s] everything I could’ve ever dreamed she would have been and more. I hope she’s saying the same thing about me!”
Jax was not saying the same thing about Stew and started Episode 5 with heavy regret, saying that their first meeting “wasn’t romantic for [her]” and that she needed to go home. When asked if she was going to meet up with Stew to go on the cast trip to Mexico, she declined the invitation.
Producers updated Stew on the situation and told him that Jax immediately left the ‘Love is Blind’ set and explicitly told them to “not provide any sort of situation for [Stew] to talk with her at this moment.” Jax did not make it clear to Stew whether or not they were still engaged.
“I still would say that this was a profoundly positive experience,” a visibly stunned Stew said. “… I have no regrets about doing this. Life goes on.”
Jax later spoke with Tudum about the proposal and her abrupt exit, sharing what happened to make her change her mind about Stew.
“It was weird,” Jax said about the proposal. “I would’ve hoped that he was up all night writing, but it felt like he was just winging it.”
She described that his speech felt more like a “superficial checklist” that wasn’t “about [her] at all.”
“I was bummed, and I couldn’t comprehend it at the time, because you want to be happy,” Jax said.
She later said that the Stew she met face-to-face was not the Stew she knew in the pods. Jax claimed he was “cocky” and “douchey,” describing that first moment as “not romantic at all.” She insisted that the immediate awkwardness and unmet expectations sent her into “flight mode,” but clarified that Stew’s supposed resemblance to Mitt Romney had nothing to do with her quick exit.
“What I felt was real at that time,” she explained. “The good and unfortunately the bad was real too, and it had nothing to do with him or his looks. It was the moment, and it was way too much for me.”
Jax said she does regret how things went down and that she wishes she had a conversation with Stew about her feelings before leaving.
“I wish I had handled it better,” she said. “He deserved a conversation, and it deserved to end differently, because he’s a gentleman and I should have handled it like a lady, but I didn’t.”
In a similar interview, Stew said that he isn’t “faulting her” for how awkward the first meeting was, saying that “the scenario is so impossible to prepare for.”
He maintains that, even though he was stunned by Jax’s ghosting, he’s proud that he portrayed an “honest representation” of himself in the pods and wouldn’t have changed anything.
New episodes of “Love is Blind” drop on Wednesday on Netflix.
You can watch a clip of the awkward scene below.
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(Photos: Netflix, Bravo)
