Love Is Blind stars Micah Lussier and Irina Solomonova have been labelled 'mean girls' by fans for their behaviour on the show - but they claim they never meant to hurt anyone.
The first five episodes of season four of the Netflix show premiered on 24 March, and Micah and Irina immediately caught viewers' attention with their pod antics.
The pair have had to switch off comments on their social media pages to avoid relentless criticism from Love Is Blind fans. It seems they were quite tactical in the shared living space with the other girls and then used what they found out to put their dates off the other girls. Worse, they were filmed laughing with one another about some of their fellow contestants. Despite this, both girls were offered proposals - which is of course what they went on the show for.
Micah, 27, spoke to Entertainment Weekly before the show aired and appeared to defend some of her behaviour. She said: 'For us, it was really helpful to have a little sense of normalcy. Being able to laugh and make light and make jokes and, well, maybe sometimes the jokes didn't land or maybe it didn't look the best, but we needed that in that moment to feel like a normal person. Because you're a part of this experience that is so beyond words. To be able to make a little bit of light out of such a hard thing was really helpful.'
The reality contestant also said that she and Irina are only in their twenties and 'have to grow up from our mistakes'.
Love Is Blind, which is hosted by married couple Nick and Vanessa Lachey, always causes a storm on social media and fans can't help but comment on what they've seen. And the consensus isn't looking great for Micah and Irina. One Twitter user wrote, 'The new love is blind is insane. micah and irina are mean girls. irina never peaked in hs [high school] and now thinks she's the sh*t.' Another said, 'I cannot wait to see Vanessa Lachey rip Irina and Micah a new one at the reunion of Love is Blind.'
Irina, 26, who also spoke to Entertainment Weekly, said, 'Me and Micah's coping mechanism was laughing about it. And I honestly will say on the record, 100%, I did not intentionally ever want to hurt anyone. [Hearing] that I hurt people's feelings genuinely breaks my heart.'
She added that there are 'some bridges that I'll have to mend' in the wake of the show, and that she didn't intend to hurt anyone's feelings.
'But I think, for me, in the experience I was kind of zoned out and in my own thing of how I'm feeling, and I didn't really realise how that could affect other people,' Irina said. 'With Micah, we were laughing because, yes, it was very serious and it was very intense and it was very hard, so I don't want to brush it off and say that we weren't taking it seriously.'
She added: 'We didn't intend to be mean or intentionally hurt anybody at all. That does honestly hurt me, hearing that, and I hope I can have some conversations to fix that later.'
The next three episodes of Love Is Blind air on 31 March.