🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

In the final moments of Love Is Blind Season 3’s first episode, two people stand at opposite ends of a long, carpeted hallway, separated by frosted glass doors. They’re engaged, but they’ve never seen each other in person — or even discussed what the other looks like, for that matter. Brennon Lemieux is a sincere, classic country cowboy with a historical fear of commitment; Alexa Alfia is an unapologetic alpha femme who never repeats an outfit or a request. They couldn’t be more different — well, save for a shared love of shakshuka — and yet somehow exchanged “I love you’s” after just a few days in the pods and agreed to get married in less than six weeks.

The doors finally open and the two lay eyes on each other for the first time when Alexa blurts out: “What the fuck?” And she kind of has a point — shakshuka is delicious, but is it enough to sustain a lifetime partnership? Or agree to marry someone you’ve never seen before?

“It was genuine!” Alexa tells Tudum a year and a half later. “Unless you fall in love with a phone sex operator that you’ve never seen before, no one else will get it.”

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That’s the appeal of Alexa and Brennon’s love story, though: It’s raw, complicated and incredibly unfiltered — well, with the exception of perhaps a few postproduction edits. According to Alexa, by day two in the pods, she knew she was in love with Brennon. But by day three, she was homesick and wanted to end the experiment altogether. Questioning why she signed up for this “absolute insanity,” she felt like there was something wrong with her: While everyone else was screening matches, creating their top-five lists and sifting through notes about their potential future husbands, Alexa only had a “top one.” By day four, she decided to stay after all, and she and Brennon canceled all their remaining dates, deciding to only talk to each other.

“I was asked numerous times what was the moment that I fell in love with him, and there were just so many moments,” she says. “But it wasn’t just like, ‘Shakshuka! Will you marry me?’” she jokes.

In truth, Alexa says, she isn’t the type of person to sign up for this kind of experiment, which is perhaps what has made her so relatable to viewers. Alexa watched Season 1 with her friends, and remembers the moment when Cameron Hamilton proposed to Lauren Speed after just one episode. Alexa’s reaction was so visceral — in such complete disbelief that someone would accept a marriage proposal without seeing the other person first — that her friends actually filmed her “screaming” at her TV. “The irony is killing me,” she says after watching herself get engaged in Episode 1.

So, how, exactly, did she end up on Love Is Blind? “I was doing dry January last year. Literally nothing to do on a Saturday night. So I was like, ‘Yeah, I can answer these [casting questionnaire’s] 200 questions. Why not?’” she says.

Alexa had no expectations to actually meet or marry anyone on the show. “I thought it would just be a cool experience,” she says. “So imagine my surprise: Episode 1, found a cowboy.”

Patrick Wymore/Netflix

Over the course of the next 10 episodes, fans follow the journey of an odd couple: Both from Dallas, Brennon comes from modest means, while Alexa comes from a wealthy Israeli family. “[The show] focused a lot on my dad having money, and me coming from that. But I didn’t have a very easy childhood,” she says. A constant point of contention in their journey is the question of whether their backgrounds — religion and class, namely — will be what tears them apart. In a pivotal moment, Alexa’s father makes a joke about Brennon getting circumcised, putting a set of knives on the table in front of him. They both laugh. For Alexa, these were the moments when she knew that the disparate circumstances of their upbringings didn’t matter — it was their innate similarities despite them that would drive them both to say “I do.”

“We both have such large families, and so much love in them — [that’s] what makes us so similar,” she says. “I’m very close with my dad and he’s very close with his dad. I’ve joked with them that I really married him for [his dad and stepmom]. So we did come from very different backgrounds, but family is what we bonded over immediately.”

When it came to a question of lifestyle and how they saw their lives together while also maintaining some of those differences in background and beliefs, Alexa says their outlooks matched completely. “I’d rather have love than money, and I think the experiences that I went through growing up really taught me that,” she says. “You can be rich and have all the money in the world, but love is priceless. We both view it that way.”

Whether she planned for it or not, Alexa’s existence in the Love Is Blind universe spurred a conversation. Or two, rather. She is the one of the few curvy women to make it out of the pods, and she also broke ground as a Jewish woman speaking openly about her religion on the show.

“If I’m going to represent something, it’s being confident in your body,” she says. “It’s 2022 and I don’t know why people are so affected by what size [other people] are. Like, am I taking up room in your space?”

She shares that she’s also received hundreds of DMs from Jewish people thanking her for speaking so publicly about her religion and identity. “It breaks my fucking heart,” she says. “I am proud to be Jewish — I’ve never questioned that; it’s a personality of mine at this point. Standing for two fucking amazing things — being curvy and standing up for Jews — I mean, that’s everything to me.”

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A year and a half — and millions of viewers — later, Alexa’s life has certainly changed. She’s received an outpouring of love (and sometimes negativity, but she’s not really paying mind to that) for her time in the show. To think she never really expected to join this group of singles, let alone meet her husband in a dating experiment, is what shocks her the most. But as soon as she catches a glimpse of him from across the room, she becomes flustered — quiet, even — in the way only someone hopelessly in love does. And that, she says, is her greatest gift from the whole journey. “It truly works,” she says.

“He’s just the greatest human being I’ve ever met in my life. I’m beyond blessed — just to know him, much less be married to him.”