Love Is Blind's Stacy explains why she didn't get back together with Izzy after wedding

Even though Stacy Snyder and Izzy Zapata didn't get married on Love Is Blind season 5, it seemed as if this couple was still going to give it a shot after filming ended. However, Sunday's reunion special revealed that the two didn't even make it a week — they spent that week apart and on their first date together, Stacy told Izzy she didn't want to continue their relationship as an engaged couple, so they ended things and didn't see each other for a year.

"I thought that after a week of the cameras going away, all of the craziness going away, that we would be able to really think about, 'Is this great? Is this going to work? Are we in a place to even be engaged?'" Stacy tells EW. "And in the time that I had, with the information I was given so last minute [about Izzy's finances and career], I feel like we need to start completely over. Obviously we have our history, but from square one, if these fundamental things haven't been addressed, we need to take steps backwards."

Stacy was shocked that Izzy didn't agree with her. "He was much more like, 'No, if you want to take steps backwards, I don't want to do this. I want to stay engaged, I want to move in, my lease is up next week, I want this to keep progressing and having momentum, otherwise it'll never work,'" Stacy says. "There was so much emotion involved and so much pain that it was like, we need to just let this go, heal, and if it's meant to be, it'll be, but right now we really need to get back to ourselves and heal."

But for Izzy, that meant giving things with his pod ex Johnie a shot only a week after he and Stacy broke up — a fact that Stacy found out from another cast member. "Renee told me — she sent me a picture of two of them together and I was like, 'Is this just a picture? What is this?'" Stacy remembers. "And she's like, 'I don't know.' Another girl from the show was like, 'No, they dated, or they tried dating.' And I'm like, 'What?!"

Stacy was shocked that, after all the negative things Izzy had told her about Johnie, that he would try to get back with her so quickly after their breakup. "It was hard for me to understand," she says. "All I could think is, 'Is it because you're hurt and you want someone that you were equally close to comfort you?' Was it a rebound? Was it, 'I regret picking Stacy, let me see if I made the wrong choice?' Was it to get back at me, and 'I hope that she sees this?' I don't know."

Stacy continues, "Part of me just wants to laugh because this is crazy. There's plenty of other fish in the sea. It didn't make a lot of sense, but it wasn't my business anymore. And I'm so glad that I wasn't involved."

Despite how things ended with Izzy — and his choices after their breakup — Stacy doesn't regret saying yes to him to the pods. "He was absolutely the right choice for me," Stacy says. "He helped me get to know myself more than I knew myself. I just thought I wasn't capable of opening up that quick, and he made me feel happy and willing to do it. How he is with how I am really allowed that connection to just be what it was. I think that it changed us both for the better, and I would've never walked out of there with anyone other than him. I still feel that way, and I want him to be happy. I'm glad I picked him."

But she does have some regrets with how some fans see her as a "bully" due to the way she was portrayed in the season. "There's just such a misconception of who I am as a person based on what you only see on TV," she says. "There's thousands of hours that are filmed, and you only see such a short portion. A huge thing that people cannot let go is this misconception that I'm the mean girl or the bully to Johnie, and there were so many things that happened that were literally the complete opposite."

While she says she doesn't want to "drag anyone through the mud," she's upset at how much hate she's getting when she claims her fight with Johnie went differently than how it's shown in the episodes. "There's certain parts where you see where she is talking poorly about me, even while I'm sitting in the room," she says. "I knew that she was, I'm sitting right there. Or when I would walk in from a date and then everyone stops talking. It was straight mean girl status."

Stacy explains that's why she was usually by herself during the pod portion of the experiment. "I'm like, 'I don't know who I can trust, I don't know if she's just talking about me and people are believing it,'" she adds. "But then when people started telling me what she was saying, I'm like, at least I can trust these people to tell me and not just sit there and join in on badmouthing me. She was, at a certain point, saying, 'If Izzy picks Stacy, he's going to be really disappointed at the reveal, because she's not hot.'"

As for the fight at the barbecue, Stacy remembers Johnie continuing to insult her. "Me, Milton, and her were having a conversation, and Milton was like, 'I don't even remember talking to Stacy in the pods, and then we all met in Mexico and she's super cool,'" she says. "And she was like, 'Oh, not memorable?' She was doing that all night to me. She was sitting with people when I would walk up and stop talking and whisper, and that's why I snapped. She crossed a boundary with me and I wanted her to know, and that's why I'm calling her out."

Stacy wishes more moments like that were shown in the episode to give viewers context of why she was so angry at Johnie. "It looks like I'm the angry person and I'm this jealous person when I have nothing to be jealous about — I am happy in my engagement, I'm confident in who I am, what I look like, I am good," she says. "But to sit here with you in front of my face and you disrespect me to that extent, I am not okay with that. And I would like to tell you that I'm not okay with it. That's how that whole thing went down."

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