Love is blind: Marissa on Ramses' separation: “I had nothing to say”

Photo: Courtesy of NETFLIX

When they first left the pods and began their honeymoon, Marissa George and Ramses Prashad seemed to be one of the few surefire couples destined to walk down the aisle Love is blind Season seven. Their energy was contagious, they looked adorable next to each other, and both reported that the sex was great. But just days before the wedding, their relationship ended in an abrupt and painful breakup – a breakup that George says was largely one-sided.

The cracks had been visible for weeks. George and Prashad have disagreed over the military, birth control and family planning, and in recent episodes he seemed apathetic at best when it came to wedding details. Prashad expressed concern when the illness prevented George from being physically intimate and she found it concerning that his reaction to her PMS and vitamin D deficiency was to worry about sex. George's friends and mother also seemed unenthusiastic about the game, which only added to the viewers' doubts.

As with much of this season of Love is blindWhatever directly brought about the end of Maramses (Ramrissa?) seemed to occur off-screen. One moment they were sitting on a boat talking about his apparent lack of interest in buying her mother flowers, and the next moment they were in her apartment crying about the breakup. To find out exactly what happened, I went straight to the source: George himself.

What caused your breakup? Did it arise from a larger conversation or did Ramses bring it up out of the blue?
I was quite surprised by the level of doubt and uncertainty he felt. Previously, our most difficult day was when we talked about a conversation he had with a family friend about how his last marriage ended and how his ex-wife had taken it. When it was brought to my attention, I felt like it would cause problems, but I didn't think we would break up. I just thought Okay, he's really sad about it. He feels things very deeply.

So leading up to this conversation I was like, “Hey, I feel like something's not right.” I feel like that's very typical of a man and a woman in a relationship – the man starts to act differently and I have to come in and say, “Hey, what's going on?” Then he said, “Yeah, I have doubts.” I don't know if he would ever bring it up otherwise.

Who did you get to know from Ramses’ environment? We didn't see any of that on screen.
I met his mother over FaceTime and she was lovely. She is very beautiful and very kind. I met his brother and niece and then I met his closest friend David who was at the tuxedo fitting. And I also met two of his close girlfriends – girls who are friends, not ex-girlfriends. These meetings went really well. They talked a lot about how they did notice a difference in our energy, but they thought it was very complementary. And Ramses was so sure until he wasn't, right? It seemed like none of his friends had asked him that. I think his brother might have done it, but that was the day before the breakup.

This is so shocking.
It was So shocking! I won't lie. If he had told me throughout the process, “Oh yeah, I love you, baby, but there are a few things we need to figure out before I move forward,” that would have helped with the breakup. But when someone looks you in the face every day, multiple times a day, and says, “I'm 100 percent committed,” it's unsettling to suddenly hear, “Not only do I not want to marry you anymore.” – I don't want to anymore go out with you. I don’t want to do anything anymore.”

At this point you really feel like your world is turned upside down. You ask yourself, “Am I crazy?”

As a viewer, this conversation highlighted many moments in retrospect – for example, when wedding planning was brought up and he seemed apathetic. Did the breakup recontextualize anything that you may have originally pushed aside?
Yes, when I watched it again I could definitely see Ramses walking away. I could tell by his lack of enthusiasm. At the beginning he was like, “I want everyone to be there,” and towards the end I did everything. And it wasn't that I had all this free time to do it, it was that I thought, “If I don't do it, who is going to do it?” He didn't respond to wedding planning emails, so I said, “Okay , I think while I'm in class I'll sit here and go through my emails, answer things and figure things out.”

At the moment I pushed things aside because I took him at face value. I say, “Hey, if you have any doubts, let’s talk about it. If you do that, that's fine, it won't cause us to break up, but we could talk about it.” And if he says, “No, no doubts, no doubts,” then what should I do? Look at him and say, “Well, you’re lying?”

In hindsight, I guess I could have said, “Well, I know you say you have no doubts, but you don't really show yourself that way.” But I also think, “That's part of the experiment.” He's overwhelmed and stressed out from filming and all the moving parts.” I just felt like I had to step in to help him there.

After the breakup, you called your mother to talk about it. What did she say to you when you told her the wedding wouldn't happen?
Oh, she was actually pretty devastated for me just because I was devastated. When I called her, she was about an hour away from me and Ramses because the wedding was in a few days and she was driving up to spend the night. Her first response was, “All right, so let me talk to him.” And I thought, “No, you're fucking kidding him!”

But in reality, she went and spoke to him privately off camera and said, “Please don't do this to my daughter.” You obviously love each other. What's going on?” I'm just trying to reason with him – that it's scary, but we could do it. Her reaction was actually very different than I expected.

To confirm that the breakup was a full breakup – and not just a postponement of the wedding?
It was a complete breakup. I gave him the option because he kept saying, “I love you.” I want to be with you. My heart wants to be with you, but I have to be logical here – I can't follow my feelings.” I was like, “Okay, let's be logical. We don't have to get married. We could just stay engaged.” Or, “We don't have to stay engaged. We could just date.” And to be honest, I didn’t really want to break up. But I was willing to meet him in a place where he never wanted to meet me. He had already made his decision. I really had no say in this breakup.

This lack of room for discussion makes me think of Ramses' seemingly uncompromising opposition to condoms. What did you do with this resistance and were you finally able to find a solution?
We decided to continue what we had been doing, which was tracking my menstrual cycle and making sure we were careful during ovulation – either using a condom or abstaining. We talked about vasectomy. He was actually like, “Whoa, I need to think about that. Most men don't have to think about it.” It was somehow about this privilege that he never had to think about it.

I knew it was bad at the time, but looking at it from the rear view, I literally said, “Either wear a condom or accept the consequences,” and he wouldn't do it either. Looking back, I think Okay, if I were pregnant, would that be “my fault”? Would he have said, “Well, I told you I don’t want to have kids”? I don't know.

From what we saw, it looked like you were in an impossible situation.
That's it, isn't it? For example, we still didn't use condoms, and that was because I was willing to accept the consequences of not using protection. In that sense I was naive. Now that I'm working on some of my people-pleasing and compromising tendencies, I would have said, “Well, if you're not ready to have a child next year, then we'll use condoms or not have sex.”

What did your friends say when you told them you and Ramses broke up?
To be honest, they were angry. I mean, they still are to this day. I think that they have already made concessions for her by accepting this person into her life as my future husband. They didn't like how prejudiced he was about divorce and the military, but they also loved seeing us together. They said they saw the love between us and they saw how much I was in love and how much he loved me, so they supported it. But when we broke up, they were angry about how it happened. They hated that aspect and they hated how much it broke me, so they hate that man.

I have to say, I watch a lot of dating shows and this breakup is one of the most painful ones I've ever seen. How did you heal from that?
It's probably the most heartbroken I've ever felt. I can barely remember the two days after the breakup. I cried a lot. I honestly couldn't speak. I didn't really want to exist, and I didn't feel that way because Ramses and I weren't together – that obviously hurt and devastated me – but my brain shut down because I couldn't understand why I didn't see it coming . I felt very stupid and very foolish. It made me question everything I had been working on in therapy for many years.

I would say it took about six months before I finally felt like a normal person again. I had to stop drinking. I drank a lot, went out a lot and behaved somewhat recklessly. And I realized that and took a break from all of that. Obviously, I went to therapy. And I surrounded myself with my friends and family. That's how I coped.