'Love Is Blind' explodes after friends with benefits situation threatens to derail engagement

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Love Is Blind Season 8

From the moment Dave Bettenburg showed off his "proud of you" tattoo, styled in his mother's handwriting, I knew he would be Love Is Blind Season 8's obligatory villain.

It’s not that "Mom" tattoos are an automatic “ick.” With the right execution, they can be sweet. Still, there was something about this tattoo on this man that rearranged the letters on his arm to spell “trouble.”

This is a guy who likes to make jokes implying that women in their 30s are basically seconds away from their so-called last f***able day. This is a guy who complains that because he works in plastic surgery, he’s seen lots of women with too much Botox and wants to settle down with something different. This is a guy whose “type” does not generally include teachers (whatever that means) and who seems shocked to learn that the former teacher he’s dating would impulsively get a tattoo in Mexico and has even sent a few nudes in her off time.

Maybe he’s gotten the "villain edit," but as depicted, Bettenburg strikes me as a guy who mentally files every woman he meets into one of two binders: the Madonnas and the whores. The virginal teachers and the sexy Botox seekers. Within that context, the mom tattoo starts to feel like a signal that he has certain expectations that no living, breathing young woman could ever hope to meet. Learning that he cannot handle that his fiancée, the perfectly lovely Lauren O’Brien, left a “friends with benefits situation” not long before entering the pods was hardly a shock.

The whole thing feels like a textbook example of “tempest in a teapot.” It turns out Bettenburg runs in the same circles as two of O’Brien’s “exes,” only one of whom she actually agrees she’s dated. Her actual ex lives with a friend of Bettenburg’s, which does feel potentially awkward, but that’s not even the issue he fixates on. Instead, Bettenburg homes in on the guy O’Brien dumped not long before joining the show.

O’Brien says that she and the mystery man were "friends with benefits" and never dated seriously; Bettenburg’s friends insist otherwise. Instead, they claim that she hooked up with him 48 hours before coming on the show. Both she and her friends say it was more than a week before, and either way, does it really matter that much? According to O’Brien, Bettenburg didn’t seem to think very highly of this guy before. But now he apparently trusts his word over hers.

The bottom line: Bettenburg claims to want to trust the supposed love of his life but refuses to let her speak with any of the apparently many people in his circle who now question her character. It’s tedious, exhausting and borderline manipulative.

None of this is anything new for the LIB universe. The “what makes a good woman?” discussion feels so ancient within and outside the show that Bettenburg would probably crack a joke about its desperation for marriage.

Each season, it seems that at least one woman runs afoul of some specific — and unfair — expectations. In Season 5, Uche Okoroha hypocritically berated Aaliyah Cosby after she disclosed that she’d once cheated on an ex. In Season 2, Abishek "Shake" Chatterjee put on a martyr routine when his (gorgeous) fiancée, Deepti Vempati, didn’t live up to his aesthetic standards.

As reality fans know, the problem extends far beyond Love Is Blind.

Sociologist Alicia Denby studied toxicity and femininity on Love Island and found that the show’s depictions of sexuality reinforce the gendered expectation that men are more sexually driven than women — and that women with high libidos are “man-eaters.”

We’ve seen this time and time again in Bachelor Nation as well. In The Bachelor Season 18, Clare Crawley was once slut-shamed for a pre-fantasy suite hookup. On The Bachelorette Season 11, Kaitlyn Bristowe got excoriated for sleeping with a contestant before the show’s sanctioned canoodling episode. Four seasons later, Hannah Brown’s suitor Luke Parker tried to question her faith based on sexual history — prompting her instantly viral response, “I have had sex … and Jesus still loves me.”

Really, the crux of Bettenburg and O’Brien’s conflict seems to have little to do with O’Brien herself. It’s Bettenburg who admits he has not dated anyone for four years and, for some reason, assumed everyone in the pods would be equally hard up.

His previous pod girlfriend, Molly Mullaney, apparently disclosed that she’d ended a long-running on-and-off situationship six months before joining the pods, and even that gave Bettenburg pause. O’Brien’s fling, he laments, is “even more recent.” What is a virtuous boy in search of a suitable bride supposed to do?

It doesn’t help that Bettenburg’s family isn’t on board with the engagement. They’re conservative — his father apparently used to sleep in the basement during family trips to his mother-in-law’s house. One can easily guess that a TV engagement might not be so welcome. To make matters worse, Bettenburg’s family and friends apparently found out that he was engaged before he had a chance to tell them and did not take it well.

Still, why does Bettenburg seem so hellbent on keeping O’Brien away from them?

In Episode 9, Bettenburg cancels a visit with his own friends after drilling O’Brien for the umpteenth time, making her cry. Meanwhile, she introduces him to her best friends. If Bettenburg’s family is so terrified that O’Brien is an attention-seeking “lunatic,” as he puts it, wouldn’t it help if they met her and saw that she’s just a chill young woman who teaches spin class and spends her down time playing card games?

As concerned as Bettenburg seems about O’Brien’s propriety, his own decorum leaves much to be desired. In Episode 8, he spends an entire cocktail mixer quizzing seemingly everyone about how far they’ve gone in bed. When a fellow castmate, Taylor Haag, asks how things are going with O’Brien, he replies, “She moves a lot at night. She pees a lot. She pees every f***ing, like, hour.” Perhaps sensing something amiss, Haag urges him, “Be nice to her.” The bar has truly fallen through the floor.

Even before this season premiered, viewers could tell Bettenburg would be its villain. His "joke" that because O’Brien was 30 years old, she was “no longer attractive” became one of the most-talked-about moments in Season 8’s trailer, and his remarks throughout the season have shown that this is, indeed, his idea of humor.

When O’Brien revealed that she and her friends are all in their thirties, he replied, “Yeah, you’re getting old so let’s crank this thing up a notch.” In Episode 7, when O’Brien asks Bettenburg during a honeymoon boat ride if he’s seen any behavior from her that makes him want to walk away, he replies, “maybe the new hair,” before throwing in his favorite tension diffuser, “I’m kidding,” after she makes a face.

Bettenburg has already deployed the “just jokes” defense in a podcast interview with Bachelor star and former reality TV villain extraordinaire Nick Viall, but the red flags go beyond a few controversial comments. His inability to let go of O’Brien’s pre-pod fling feels especially disingenuous, considering how long he refused to choose between her and Mullaney. If the concern is whether or not both of them are “ready” for marriage, wouldn’t struggling to choose between two people be a bigger concern than having hooked up with fling days before leaving for the world’s longest speed dating marathon?

Let’s also not forget that when confronted about his indecision in the pods, Bettenburg tried to write it off as “girl drama.” That move was almost as annoying as his complaint this week in Episode 9 that the hook-up nonsense that he and his friends are perpetuating feels like immature “high school” business — to which one of O’Brien’s friends sagely replies, “That’s what makes me worry about your friends.”

Apparently, none of this matters more than Bettenburg’s sense of moral superiority. He spends Episodes 7 through 9 complaining that he can’t get “past” O’Brien’s supposed indiscretion. He tortures her by sharing supposed “facts” his friends have presented him without ever giving her the chance to speak to those questioning her character. He says he can’t stand going to sleep next to her knowing that not long before this experiment, she slept next to someone else. Never mind that she’s said repeatedly that she and this guy were never in a relationship, never hung out with each other’s friends and never did sleepovers.

Each time Bettenburg hits O’Brien with these allegations, he follows them up by affirming how much he loves and admires her. Still, the feelings never seem to earn her any benefit of the doubt. Can you really claim to love someone if you refuse to trust them?

This saga is bound to spill into future episodes. At the end of Episode 9, Bettenburg decides to go out drinking with his friends rather than talk things out. How would he have reacted, I wonder, if the roles were reversed? Would he be OK with O’Brien abandoning a serious conversation to go hang with the gals, or would that further fuel his condemnation?

Then again, perhaps this is what we should expect from a guy who once flunked a book report on The Scarlet Letter.