Love Is Blind season 10 contestant Chris Fusco is opening up about his controversial split from Jessica Barrett — where he said he tends to date women who work out regularly.
In the episode, Chris shared that he has been with “women with a different type of …” before Jessica finished his sentence and said, “Different type of body?” Reflecting back, Chris shared that he “definitely would’ve expressed the words that came out of [his] mouth differently.”
“I really just wanted to be completely honest with her about how I was feeling,” he told Entertainment Weekly in an interview that was published on Wednesday, February 18. “I respect Jessica so much, still, and she [is] such an amazing person, where I felt like I didn’t want to make anything up. I felt like maybe just being super direct and honest about how I felt was the best route at the time, and just explaining what I’m normally attracted to physically without… because I mean, on the show, we’re meeting someone based on emotional connection, so we’re doing it pretty much backwards than the normal dating life.”
When asked for his thoughts on how Jessica reacted to his comment, Chris admitted, “I think she has every right to be upset.”
“It’s just a hard thing to say,” he said. “I really wasn’t trying to be hurtful. I really wasn’t trying to [have] any [malicious] intention behind it. Looking back, like I said, I would’ve chosen my words differently, and just would’ve expressed how I felt in that moment differently. But I think she has every right to be a little upset about the way I brought it up. I haven’t seen the episode yet — I lived it, but it was also a year ago.”
If he could redo the moment, Chris shared he would “approach it with a little more empathy, maybe a slighter tone, considering her feelings with those words.”
“And my intention was not to say she was this horrible person, or anything about body-shaming, or anything like that,” he continued. “That wasn’t my intention. It was just to explain how I was feeling at the time with our current connection that wasn’t emotional.”
When asked whether viewers “will be wrong to interpret that conversation” as him “body-shaming” Jessica, Chris replied, “I think people are going to interpret it however they want to interpret it, and they’re going to have feelings about however they want to feel. But that wasn’t my intention. I should have chosen my words differently, so I will agree with that.”
After their conversation, Chris and Jessica went their separate ways — something he said he’s not sure he was “shocked” about.
“I just wasn’t sure what was happening during that moment because she got up, walked away, and I have no idea what she was going through or saying. I figured it’s a hard thing to recover from,” he explained.
He continued, “We’re engaged, we had this crazy, incredible time in the pods, and I just wasn’t sure where everything was at, and everything was happening very fast. I was just trying to see how it would land and how she would respond, because we had such an amazing emotional connection where I wasn’t sure what was to follow after I just brought up some of these concerns.”
Love Is Blind is currently streaming on Netflix.
