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SPOILER: Since they said “I do not,” viewers have had questions over why Cole and Zanab broke up from Love Is Blind season 3 and where they are now after their wedding ended with a broken engagement.
Cole Barnett and Zanab Jaffrey are two of 30 contestants from Love Is Blind season 3, which premiered on Netflix on October 19, 2022 and followed 15 men and 15 women from the Dallas, Texas, as they speed-dated in “Pods” where they can talk but not see each other. During their 10 days in “The Pods”, the couples decide if they wanted to get engaged—still sight unseen—or end their relationships for a better connection with someone else. After the proposal, the couples meet face-to-face for the first time and go on a honeymoon, where they learn more about each other and meet the other couples. After the trip, the couples, who all live in the same city, return to the real world and move into an apartment together as they meet each other’s families and friends and prepare for their weddings. At the altar on their wedding days, the couples must decide whether to marry or breakup as they answer the age-old question of if love can be truly blind.
Since Love Is Blind premiered on Netlix in 2020, the show has become one of service’s highest-rated series, with more than 30 million views in its first two months. “Across the world, everybody feels the same way: Everyone wants to be loved for who they are on the inside. It doesn’t matter where you live, what you look like, how old you are, what your background is, which class you know, or social structure you feel like you’re a part of, everyone wants to be loved for who they are,” creator Chris Coelen told Variety in 2020. “In today’s society we’ve got all these ways to find love through dating apps and technology. Those things sort of counterintuitively have made people feel disposable. They’ve made people feel like it’s all surface level. It does the opposite thing it was supposed to do. So we thought, what if we took everybody’s devices away, how could we get them to focus on connecting with other people?”
Coelen also told Variety about how the connections on Love Is Blind were based on choice, which is why the relationships were that much stronger. “It was incredibly scary because nobody had to do anything, versus a show like we do Married at First Sight, you sign up and you know, you’re getting married to a stranger. Here, nobody had to do anything. It was if you find someone, if you choose. Which is so scary. They don’t have to go through with the wedding ceremony,” he said. “But assuming they found someone, could that love overcome any judgment in the real world? That’s an incredibly fascinating question. And that’s what we set out to try to examine.”
But back to Cole and Zanab. So…why did Cole and Zanab break up from Love Is Blind season 3 and are they back together after filming ended? Here’s what we know about why Cole and Zanab broke up on Love Is Blind season 3 and where they are now since they ended their engagement on their wedding day.
Why did Cole and Zanab break up from Love Is Blind season 3?
Image: Courtesy of Netflix.
Why did Cole and Zanab break up from Love Is Blind season 3? Cole and Zanab broke up in episode 11 of Love Is Blind season 3 after Zanab told Cole “I do not” at the altar of their wedding. “Cole, you have taught me so much about myself in the last two months, and you have shared so much of who you are, and I am so thankful for that. I think I have a really good idea about the type of woman that’s gonna love you the way that Cole needs to be loved every day for the rest of your life, and I think you and I both know that is not me,” Zanab told Cole as she broke up with him. “As much as I have wanted it to be me and have tried to manipulate myself to be that person for you, the last two months have not been picture-perfect.” She continued, “You have disrespected me. You have insulted me. You have critiqued me, and for what it’s worth, you have single-handedly shattered my self-confidence, and I hate that you have had that kind of effect on me. And the messed-up thing is I know I love you, but everything in me and the logical part of my brain tells me that love shouldn’t feel this way. Love shouldn’t hurt like this. I can’t marry you, and I don’t.”
The County of Dallas’ official public records system also confirmed Cole and Zanab didn’t get married at the same time as the other married Love Is Blind season 3 couples, as the county’s search system didn’t have a record of their marriage license. During the Love Is Blind season 3 reunion, Zanab accused Cole of making comments about her weight and diet while they were engaged, which were edited out of Love Is Blind. “The pushing food away from me. Asking me if I’m going to eat that. Trying to get me to order a salad. The daily comments about my face and my body were not used. That’s great because it really did protect you, and you are now denying it and now calling me a liar in front of all these people,” Zanab said. Zanab also accused Cole of questioning if she should eat two tangerines, which he denied. Love Is Blind later confirmed Zanab’s story after the reunion by showing a clip of the scene.
In an interview with People, Zanab explained that another issue in her relationship with Cole was that his family refused to be a part of their Love Is Blind journey, which Zanab struggled to move on from because she had lost both of her biological parents. She told People that she believed her and Cole’s relationship could have ended differently if his family was a part of their relationship. “I really do,” she said. “Not to toot my own horn; parents love me. I would’ve loved the chance to meet them, win them over, maybe if Cole had the support of his family. I did get to meet some of his friends and they said, ‘Wow, we love her for you.’ I do think when we had our highs, I brought out a different side of Cole and I think maybe we wouldn’t have ended up where we did. So I do think it could have made a difference? Absolutely.”
Cole, for his part, told People that the “biggest issue” in his and Zanab’s relationship was “compatibility and personality,” not the “physical aspect,” as Love Is Blind season 3 was edited to show. “It’s obvious with my story, I think we all know the things that I could change,” he said. “But one thing I think hasn’t been spoken to a lot is that the probability of coming out of the pods and really being with someone who y’all’s lives and personalities are just going to mesh perfectly is not huge.” He continued, “It really looks like our biggest issue was this physical aspect, and it wasn’t. Our biggest issue was just compatibility and personality. I’m glad I did it with Zay, but it’s just, that was part of the test of the experiment, seeing if it could work in the real world, and ours just didn’t. So, yes, I know the mistakes that I and she both made that we could change along the way, but that’s life.” Despite her breakup with Cole, Zanab also told People that she didn’t have any regrets over her experience on Love Is Blind. “Cole was my person. Cole was the only person in that experiment for me, so I am glad I chose him. I’m glad he taught me what he did, and I’m glad I got to see who he really is,” she said.
In an interview with Variety after the Love Is Blind season 3 reunion, Zanab also reacted to Cole’s comment during the season about how she didn’t like his past girlfriends who were named things like “Lily.” The told the magazine that she interpreted the comment to mean Cole only dated white women. “Everyone heard it. Even watching it back, I was like, wow, I really didn’t hear that like everyone else heard it. I’ve gotten hundreds of messages like what you just said: ‘He’s saying this,’” she said. “In the heat of that moment, I didn’t necessarily hear it. But we’d had conversations about women he previously dated. There were many conversations about how to I did not look like it or live up to it.”
Are Cole and Zanab back together after Love Is Blind season 3?
Image: Netflix.
Are Cole and Zanab back together after Love Is Blind season 3? The answer is no. During the Love Is Blind season 3 reunion, Cole and Zanab confirmed they weren’t back together and were still broken up. In an interview with People after the Love Is Blind season 3 reunion, Zanab confirmed she and Cole “do not speak” after their breakup. “I did not stand up there and say no to the Cole that everyone got to see. There was a lot more,” she said. “I stand by everything I said…We do not speak. We didn’t really leave a friendship or a mutual respect, I think, for each other to have. So there isn’t communication between the two of us.” Cole, for his part,claimed that he and Zanab still talk but they’ve both moved on from each other. “Zay and I are having a lot of hard conversations and working through a lot of our baggage from our relationship,” he said. “We talked a few weeks ago, and then we just recently here in the last week have been talking a lot. So we care about each other a lot, but we have a lot of pain from our past.”
In an interview with Variety after the Love Is Blind reunion, Zanab revealed that she’d been in therapy because of her relationship with Cole. “I did leave that relationship broken. I was devastated not to get married. I was sad that I had this great love and it didn’t result in a healthy relationship that turned into a happy marriage. I recognized some stuff on myself that I was like, ‘Wow, I need to go build myself back up. I used to be a words of affirmation person. I need to do that. I need reassurance. I need to get back to myself and encourage myself,’” she said. “So that’s really what I’ve done for the last year. I did go to therapy after the wedding, because I was like, ‘When this comes out, I’m going to have to revisit this and I don’t want to be slingshotted back to how low I feel right now.’” She continued, “I’ve been in therapy for a year, and I’ll probably continue going to therapy because I think therapy is wonderful. I’ve just taken all that that relationship taught me and truly just been so selfish this year and poured into myself and loved myself hard and gave myself those affirmations because I never want to be in that low of a space in a relationship ever again. I just want to give my healthiest, happiest self to someone.” Zanab also opened up about the unhealthy eating habits she’d developed as a result of her relationship with Cole. “I did love him. The things he was saying to me did hurt. I was somehow trying to make myself desirable to him, whether it be skinnier, or… [pauses and takes a deep breath] I’ve never had someone speak to me that way about my body or eating. That was very real for me. I did change what I was eating. I was just eating a banana. I did lose weight by the wedding day. It had nothing to do with fitting into my wedding dress,” she said.
Zanab also confirmed that, while she appreciated her experience on Love Is Blind, she wouldn’t do the show again. “Cole was the only one for me in that experiment. Our reveal, I loved. It was so genuine. I was so happy, and I thought I had met my person,” she said. “The context of what I was trying to say was that I would do it again and choose him again knowing the outcome. It did send me on a journey. It forced me to dig deeper within myself. I learned so much about myself.” She continued, “Would I repetitively do it again? No. But I don’t regret Cole coming into my life. I don’t ever regret being that happy and in love with him at one point. To do it again would be so I could experience that high with him again, even knowing where it came to. I just think the direction it put me in my life, it taught me something. I’m choosing to take a lesson from our relationship instead of being angry at him.”
Who is Cole from Love Is Blind season 3?
Image: Ser Baffo/Netflix.
Who is Cole from Love Is Blind season 3? Cole is a 27-year-old from Fort Worth, Texas. He listed his job on Love Is Blind season 3 as a “Realtor.” His Instagram handle is @colebrennanbarnett. “Fort Worth📍 Real Estate🏠 Outdoorsman🎣” his Instagram bio reads. According to his Linkedin, Cole is the owner of Bdellium Real Estate, which he launched in August 2019. He also works as an Acquisition Manager at JZ Home Buyer, where he’s worked since May 2020. “After graduating college with my bachelors I took a small detour to San Diego working as a Youth Pastor, until I decided to come home and jump into Real Estate. With a year and a half of Real Estate under my belt, my company Bdellium Real Estate is consistently doing 1-2 deals per month and scaling quickly. Our goal is to begin to renovate more houses, restoring the neighborhoods of Fort Worth, and to hold more rental properties, providing living solutions to renters in DFW,” Cole’s Linkedin bio reads. He graduated from The King’s University in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in General Christian Studies. Cole also posts vlogs on his YouTube channel, Cole Barnett, including a video of him on the way to film Love Is Blind for the first time. “On my way to the pods to find wifey. I took this on my way to LA before I had any clue what Love is Blind was going to be like. I didn’t,” Cole wrote in the description.
Who is Zanab from Love Is Blind season 3?
Image: Ser Baffo/Netflix.
Who is Zanab from Love Is Blind season 3? Zanab Jaffrey is a 32-year-old from Dallas, Texas. She’s originally from London. She listed her job on Love Is Blind season 3 as a “Realtor.” Her Instagram handle is @zanabjaffrey. “ZEN-ub” | Zae 🇬🇧🇵🇰 Chosen. Realtor. Globetrotter,” her Instagram bio reads. According to her Linkedin, Zanab works as a Realtor at Ebby Halliday Realtors, where she’s worked since December 2020. She also works as a Flight Attendant at American Airlines in the Dallas/Wort Worth area. Before that, she worked as an Instructor at Spenga, a Spin Instructor at LA Fitness, and a Business Media Sales Specialist at MultiView. She graduated Cum Laude from the University of Texas at Arlington in 2014 with a bachelor’s of arts in public relations and image management. She also earned an associate’s of arts degree in general studies from Tarrant County College, where she was a member of the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society.
Where was Love Is Blind season 3 filmed?
Image: Courtesy of Netflix.
Love Is Blind season 3 was filmed in Dallas, Texas. Love Is Blind season 1 was filmed in Atlanta, Georgia, while season 2 was filmed in Chicago, Illinois. In an interview with Entertainment Tonight in 2020, Love Is Blind creator Chris Coelen explained that each season casts contestants from the same city so long distance isn’t a factor in their relationships. “It was a really interesting and diverse cast in terms of the fact that they were all from many different places originally,” he said. “But they were all living around the Atlanta area [at the time of casting]. The reason that we did that was because we wanted to give these people a real shot at making their relationships work for the long term.”
He continued, “Whether you think [love] is going to happen or not, we wanted people that would be ready to be married. If you’re really in it—genuinely in it, which was the No. 1 casting criteria—it felt to us that it was too much of a bridge for someone living in Miami and someone living in Seattle to build. We thought let’s at least start with them in the same geographical area.”
Coelen also explained to Variety in 2020 about why he wanted each Love Is Blind season to cast contestants from the same city. “We wanted people to all be living, currently in the same place. It’s too difficult if you’re from Tampa and they’re from Portland, that just throws another wrench in. We wanted to give them a real shot at making their love and their marriage working,” he said. Coelen also told Variety at the time about the locations he was looking at for future Love Is Blind seasons. “Look, the idea is that ultimately we’re going to do this in other countries—it’s very global. There’s lots of places that that we could take it. Chicago is a great place to look at, so is New York, Boston, Houston. There’s so many different places that we could go. And like I said, outside of the country as well,” he said.
Coelen also told Oprah magazine in 2020 that The Pods lasted around 10 days, which started with a series of speed dates between contestants that lasted between eight to 12 minutes. We did a ranking system, from who you though was most compatible to least compatible after the first date. Every day, the list got shorter and shorter,” Love Is Blind season 1 contestant Mark Cuevas told Oprah magazine at the time. Coelen also told Oprah magazine made the cast smaller a few days into the The Pods stage to focus on the contestants forming “real connections.” “We ended up focusing on people who were really forming real connections,” he said.
Though the dates started short, Coelen told Variety that the producers allowed contestants to have longer dates once they saw how strong their connections were. “In the beginning nobody knew who anybody was. So we structured it so that they would have an opportunity to talk to everyone. They were never given any instruction on what to say or what not to say or what they could ask about or what they couldn’t ask about. And you see on the show, some people decided to [ask] ‘How tall are you, what do you look like?’” he said. “Other people were like, ‘Why would I ever do that? That’s not the point of this.’ We really wanted it to be their own story, their own journey. We would set it up so they had the opportunity to talk to everybody. Then from that point [it was monitored]. Let’s say somebody really wanted to talk to you and you’re like, ‘Yeah, I have no interest in that person.’”
He continued, “You’re not going to talk to them. It doesn’t matter. We’re not going to arrange people to speak to one another where somebody’s like, ‘yeah, I don’t want to talk to that person.’ We just wouldn’t do that. Multiple points throughout the day we had to break and they had to eat, go to the bathroom, go do interviews, but generally we wanted to give them as much time in the pods as possible with the people that they genuinely wanted to talk to. These dates are obviously cut down but they were hours and hours and hours long.”
Who are the Love Is Blind season 3 hosts?
Image: Courtesy of Netflix.
The Love Is Blind season 3 hosts are Nick Lachey and Vanessa Lachey, who have hosted the series since it premiered in February 2020. The couple also hosted season 1 of Netflix’s The Ultimatum. Nick was the lead singer of the boy band 98 Degrees from 1996 to 2012. The group reunited in 2012 and are still together. Nick has also released four solo alums: SoulO, What’s Left of Me, A Father’s Lullaby and Soundtrack of My Life. He was married to Jessica Simpson from 2002 to 2006, and the two also starred in their own reality show, Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica on MTV, from 2003 to 2005. Nick is also the winner of season 5 of The Masked Singer during which he performed as the character “Piglet.” Vanessa was the 1998 Miss Teen USA and was a correspondent for Entertainment Tonight and Total Request Live on MTV. She’s the current lead in CBS’ NCIS spinoff, NCIS: Hawai’i, which premiered in 2021.
In an interview with Distractify in March 2022, Nick explained that he and Vanessa wanted to host Love Is Blind because of how their own relationship was long distance when they first started dating. “When Netflix approached us with Love is Blind all those years ago, we jumped at the opportunity because the show really spoke to us personally,” Nick said. “When we first started dating, Vanessa was in New York and I was in Los Angeles. We didn’t get to see each other a lot so we had a lot of long phone conversations, learning everything we possibly could about each other.” He continued, “[Those conversations were] really important for building our relationship and knowing we wanted the same things before there were external pressures on the relationship.” Nick also told Distractify that he and Vanessa want contestants to “fall in love for the right reasons and then introduce everything else.”
Nick also told People in 2022 about how he thinks Love Is Blind would’ve worked for him and Vanessa if they had met in The Pods. “We’ve thought about that, often. And I really, I’m not just saying this for the benefit of this show, I think we would’ve,” he said. “We have the same birthday, we have the same passions, we have the same interests, we have the same drive. Things that motivated us.” Vanessa asked “You would’ve found me through a wall?” to which Nick responded, “I would find you anywhere.” He continued, “I really do think we would’ve found each other. I think we would’ve gravitated to each other. That’s what we did in life. Obviously, we knew each other.” Vanessa added, “We did. We had to find our journey to get to each other.”
Nick also claimed to Us Weekly in 2022 that he would’ve joined Love Is Blind if he was single. “I would. I mean, it’s fascinating,” he said. “Especially having seen the success of season 1 and seeing two loving couples still married to this day? If I watched that and I was looking for love, why wouldn’t you wanna be a part of that? You know, it’s proven to work!” He added, “This dating world is not one I ever was part of — this very superficial ‘swipe left.’ There’s so much judgment and you can Google everybody. I’m not from that era.”
Love Is Blind season 3 is available to stream on Netflix.
Image: Courtesy of Gallery Book.
For more about Love Is Blind, read Cameron Hamilton and Lauren Speed’s 2021 book, Leap of Faith: Finding Love the Modern Way. In the book, Cameron and Lauren, who were one of two couples to marry from Love Is Blind season 1, share their “engaging and accessible love advice for the modern world” and reveal exclusive behind-the-scenes details from the Netflix series and what went down in The Pods that viewers didn’t see. The book is told from Cameron and Lauren’s alternating points of view as the fan-favorite couple dishes on what it was really like to marry a “faceless stranger” on television and opens up about how their relationship shifted—”for better and for worse”—once cameras stopped rolling and Lauren and Cameron’s relationship continued in the real world. Leap of Faith: Finding Love the Modern Way is a must-read for any Love Is Blind fan.
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