Yahoo News Love Is Blind's Carlton Morton and Diamond Jack have spoken about what's happened since filming
Note: This article contains spoilers for Love Is Blind, episodes one - five.
Love Is Blind, Netflix's divisive new dating show, is a wild ride and certainly seems to have captured the attention of viewers.
Carlton Morton and Diamond Jack became the first couple to quit and walk away from the dating experiment, after a particularly emotional argument saw them realise that they weren't right for each other after all.
Love Is Blind, which will release batches of episodes onto the streaming platform over a three-week period, sees a line-up of singles set out to date a number of potential suitors without ever actually seeing them. Yes, that's right, Love Is Blind's dates take place with each person chilling in their own separate pod, where they can communicate only through a shiny blue wall.
After what feels like minutes (in real-time, it's a matter of days) some of the contestants start to profess their love for one another and take the next step of the process – engagement. Naturally.
Only then, with a ring on their fingers, do the couples get to actually meet face-to-face for the first time.
From this moment, it started to fall apart for Carlton and Diamond. Having established a deep connection in the pods, Carlton decided that he felt ready to tell her that he had previously dated people of "both genders".
Diamond found this difficult to process and believed that she should have been told earlier, while Carlton felt that he wasn't being accepted as his true self. After a night apart Diamond decided to sit down to talk about it with him in more depth and, unfortunately, their exchange got heated and defensive, resulting in an argument and some name-calling.
They each decided to leave the experiment, and therefore the show, as singles.
"I have clearly realised this is not the woman for me," Carlton said in episode four, after their confrontation. "She has proven herself to be ignorant, she has proven herself to be stereotypical... I feel betrayed just as much as she feels betrayed."
"I was about to walk down the aisle with someone that clearly I didn't know," Diamond then told the camera. "And I feel like, it shouldn't have got that way. I was really there just to talk to him and tell him how I felt... So it's a done deal with us."
Later in the episode, in a confessional-style interview, Carlton added: "I feel like both of our hearts and who we truly were at the core, and who we truly are, got overshadowed by assumption, defence, and pride."
Since the Love Is Blind episode launched on Netflix, both Carlton and Diamond have spoken out about what happened during their journey on the reality show.
Carlton's Instagram account appears to have been made private, but he has spoken out via a Twitter account which remains unverified, but is followed by the official Love Is Blind show account.
"Watching my talk with Diamond always makes me emotional. You can see the struggle in our faces during the convo. Very scary for us both," Carlton wrote, alongside a crying emoji and a broken heart emoji.
Carlton has also been retweeting messages of support from viewers, many of whom were pleased to see some LGBTQ+ representation on their screens, even if it wasn't quite handled in the correct way.
"So glad you were on the show tho! [sic] We need more representation from (black/brown) bi/queer men..." one Twitter user wrote, while another added: "I feel for Carlton. The stigma against Queer men is real."
Sadly, Carlton has also shared that he has been receiving abuse from Twitter trolls as a result of the scenes on the show.
As for Diamond, she has told Entertainment Weekly that she and Carlton "definitely made a connection" that was "sweet" and "warm."
Talking about Carlton's decision to open up to her about his sexuality, she said that she felt "a whole bunch of emotions."
"I didn’t know how to cope with it," she said. "I just needed my space. I didn't know what to think or say and I knew I didn't want to say the wrong things because I knew how he was really opening up and that's what I want."
Diamond also expressed that she felt that "it should have been expressed sooner", but conceded that she knows it can be "hard to express that initially because you don't want people to make judgements about you or think of you in a certain way."
Diamond does wish she'd handled it a little differently though, admitting that she was reacting to some of the more "disrespectful" things that Carlton said to her in the heat of the moment.
"I reacted in a way I wish I would have never done but emotions were running high and I was disrespected," she also told EW. "And so it blew up way bigger than I thought. But it happened and I do apologise for my reaction — I wish I would have handled it a little differently but I'm human and I had a natural reaction to how I felt and I had to stand up for myself."
The Love Is Blind contestant also revealed that, since the show, she and Carlton are now speaking again as friends.
Love Is Blind's first five episodes are available to stream on Netflix now, and new episodes will drop on February 20.
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