Love Is Blind season 7 star Monica Davis ended her engagement to Stephen Richardson, but they still occasionally keep in touch.
“It’s something that we continue to work through [and] you’ll hear more at the reunion,” Monica, 37, said during the Thursday, October 1, episode of “The Viall Files” podcast. “We are in communication — not often. There’s not a lot of depth there by any means, but we communicate.”
Monica and Stephen, 34, got engaged sight unseen in the Love Is Blind pods when the experiment came to Washington, D.C. in October 2023, which started airing on Netflix one year later. As their physical relationship grew once they finally met, things shifted after leaving their post-pod vacation.
Monica had learned that Stephen was texting with another woman about “dirty” sexual fantasies and attempted to lie about it. They ended up calling off their engagement ahead of their planned wedding day. According to Monica, the message popped up on Stephen’s phone when she went to reply to a separate one sent by costars Taylor Krause and Garrett Josemans about their plans to deliver homemade fall-themed cookies.
“Stephen and I were hanging out, having a great time and he stepped into the bathroom. A text popped up that we were waiting for from Garrett,” Monica recalled to podcast host Nick Viall. “I went to go click the message and next thing I know I’m in his texts and I see a girl’s name. This was not something that I was expecting from this person at all.”
She added, “There was a second there where I, literally, remember thinking, ‘Should I click on this? No, don’t be crazy.’ And I clicked it.”
Monica claimed she “scrolled through a bunch” of messages, feeling “so taken aback” about the explicit content. (The pair did not have in-depth conversations about certain fantasies up until that point.)
“I couldn’t breathe,” Monica said on Thursday. “I’m not kink-shaming; I just didn’t know. This wasn’t the person that I was sharing a bed with by any means. … I was taking this experiment so seriously, like, I was really in love with this person.”
Monica said that Stephen had “made [her] feel so safe” to share vulnerable details in advance of their wedding day.
“I never in a million years would have expected that he would have done what he did,” she mused on the podcast. “Such a big part of our relationship was just talking through my trauma. I was thinking about marrying this person in a matter of weeks, so I was not holding back. You don’t have a chance to leave a stone unturned, like, you have to address everything.”
One of the texts Monica found revealed that the electrician wanted to be “treated like a piece of meat.”
“I was like, ‘What the hell? How did we get here? How did we get to this point in the conversation?’” she recalled to Vulture, alleging that his “drunk at a sleep test” explanation was a “scapegoat.”
When Monica and Stephen decided to call it quits for good, she asked him to Venmo her for half of their living expenses.
“It was something so classic for how he was behaving in that moment, which was a little bit like, ‘Woe is me,’” Monica recalled to the outlet. “I think it said ‘I’m the biggest piece of s—’ or something like that. Not ‘I’m sorry,’ not an emoji. It was just another, like, you know, ‘Feel bad for me because this is a problem that I have.’ I was rolling my eyes so hard in that moment.”While Monica still thinks Stephen is “a good person,” she teased that there are still major conversations to have during the upcoming reunion, which hits Netflix later this month.
“I would really want to understand if, truly [and] genuinely, he was being honest,” she said on Thursday’s podcast episode. “Did he come on this show of actually leaving with a wife? That’s my biggest question. I think he would have been happy to leave with a girlfriend, but I don’t think he was looking for marriage. I think the reunion is going to be wild.”
Love Is Blind season 7 is currently streaming on Netflix. New episodes drop Wednesdays. The reunion airs Wednesday, October 30, at 9 p.m. ET.
