Lauren O'Brien can pinpoint the exact moment she knew her engagement to David "Dave" Bettenberg was over.
Speaking to PEOPLE after the latest batch of Love Is Blind season 8 episodes dropped on Netflix, Lauren, 31, says she can clearly remember the moment she knew their relationship was done.
"I think that that conversation in the movie theater is my breaking point," she explains. "You see him shift his tone a little bit and get angry with me and I'm like, this is not how my person will speak to me. We're done."
"It was the nail in the coffin for how emotionally drained I was," she continues. "And then that's the way he was approaching me and my family. It's like, I can't. I've over-explained the s--- out of this situation. And nothing I say or do will make you look at it differently until you hear it from your friends."
As fans know, Lauren and Dave met and developed a connection inside the season 8 pods before getting engaged sight unseen. However, things took a turn when Dave, 33, learned that Lauren had been seeing someone before coming on the show — and his inner circle happened to know the guy.
Dave then started to question Lauren's intentions and whether she was truly ready for marriage. She insisted things were not serious between them and begged Dave to let her explain herself to his friends and family, but he never gave her the chance. After failing to see eye-to-eye on the matter and Dave subsequently questioning why Lauren's father didn't want to be featured on the show, the pair called things off in episode 11.
"At the time, I will say I was really conflicted on who is in the right here," Lauren says. "Am I not reading this right? Did I f--- up and or is Dave over-exaggerating? I really did kind of grapple with the truth, but at the end of the day I was like, I know my story and I know the narrative and I know everything about this. So I just couldn't fully see why it was breaking up an engagement."
"I think it was fair of him to question me," she adds. "I don't think it was fair to not let me be part of the conversation or to not hear me out."
Addressing her former hookup, Lauren doubles down that it was nothing more. "I say it very clearly and I still stand by everything I said," she says. "This guy knew that I was having casting conversations the entire time that we were hooking up. And this was a friend with benefits. And I truly do think that he also saw it that way at the time."
She also points out that she did not know if he was being cast by the show, saying, "We had never talked about that piece of things."
However, Dave saw things differently. "This is coming from not only my sister, who knows this guy's best friend but also, my really close college friends that know him [and] were all telling me that they had been dating for three months, she was staying at his place the week before she left," he explains.
"I am hearing all these things and I'm just like, there's just no way I'm going to marry this person if that's what she was doing coming into it," he adds. "I just can't justify that."
Dave also says he refused to prolong the relationship out of respect for his family and friends.
"I got to the point where I was like, I'm not going to force my best friends and family members to come watch me say no at the altar, when I knew that was going to be my answer based off of the information I had at that time," he shares. "I just thought it was pointless."
Though things didn't work out in her favor, Lauren acknowledges that Dave "was making the best decision [for himself] with the information that he had at the time."
"Obviously I hate the way that it was attempted to be villainizing to me, and that wasn't fair to me," she says, before noting that "there's not a path forward for us in terms of a romantic relationship" after this.
"I don't hate the guy. I hope he learns from this and grows from this and takes these experiences into future relationships [but] that ship has sailed," she says. "You can't come back from that. Because again, I truly look back and I'm like, this wasn't about this guy. This was about you and the way that you treated me and I can't look at that differently now, especially when I have the evidence that I could re-watch every day if I wanted to."
