Love Is Blind co-stars and podcast co-hosts Natalie Lee and Deepti Vempati might be close now, but it wasn’t always that way. The season 2 stars of the Netflix dating show opened up about the highs and lows of their friendship on the latest episode of their Out of the Pods podcast, sharing that it was Deepti’s friendships and relationships with fellow co-stars that got in the way of her being close with the other core women from the cast.
“I remember we used to post the five of us so often that people were like, ‘They’re all best friends!’ But little did they know you and I weren’t very close and there were different dynamics in the group,” Natalie said.
“I would say the big thing was your relationship with Kyle [Abrams] but also a little bit of Shake [Chatterjee],” Natalie told her friend.
Deepti got engaged to Shake on the reality show, only to turn him down at the altar after enduring countless comments about how he was not physically attracted to her. Deepti and Natalie shared that for a time after filming wrapped, Deepti maintained a friendship with Shake.
“The women on our cast did not understand it,” Natalie said of the friendship. “What’s great about you, Deepti, is that you don’t get involved in the drama, per se, you kind of like keeping the peace. But with that, it comes with you keeping your distance.”
After filming on the show and reunion special wrapped, Deepti reconnected with one of her pod connections — Kyle Abrams — who originally proposed to Shaina Hurley. It was this relationship ahead of filming the After the Altar special that alienated Deepti from many of the other women in the cast.
“Then your relationship with Kyle was what I think really made the dominos fall,” Natalie said, with Deepti agreeing.
“I hung out with Kyle so much and you guys were like, ‘Absolutely not, that’s not somebody I want around,’ and so we kind of did our own thing,” Deepti said of the short-lived romance. “Until I was out of the relationship with Kyle, that’s when I understood why the dynamic of our relationship was so different. I kind of did feel bad because I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, why are the girls so distant from me?'”
Deepti shared that it was a “very honest conversation” with co-star Iyana McNeely that helped her to realize the distance between herself and the other women on the cast.
“She was like, ‘Deepti, it’s just hard to trust you because you’re with Kyle,'” Deepti said. “I don’t know if you guys thought we were clout chasing together or what the dynamic was, but you couldn’t trust telling me things because he would know about it.”
Natalie said that she “did not trust” Kyle or like him from the start.
“I always felt like he did things specifically for clout and attention,” she said of her former co-star. “I think what really turned me off about Kyle or what made me question him a lot was I felt like he was doing things specifically for clout and attention, using other people in the process of getting that. I felt like he was using you. It was very clear if you were there and you spoke to him, I don’t think he was the type of person that was portrayed on the show. I think he was very different and very smart and calculating.”
Deepti admitted that she didn’t see that in the moment, saying they did “have so many amazing moments together,” but added, “But looking at it from an outside perspective now, I’m like, yes, I think that did play a role in it. He’s just an interesting character is all I can say.”
Natalie said that despite Kyle’s apparent intentions, she did think that he liked Deepti and that their relationship was “real,” that ultimately the romance was “a learning lesson” for her friend.
“Him being removed out of my life is the one thing that changed the dynamic of all of our friendships, like you, me, Iyana for sure,” Deepti said. “Because I felt like I could earn your trust back again being like, ‘Oh my gosh, I had no idea this was the source of the problem.'”
Natalie took some of the blame, saying, “At the end of the day, I also don’t think it was fair for us to judge you based off your relationship with him… We felt very like, ‘We can’t trust Kyle and we don’t know what he was going to say or do or whatever that we’re gonna keep our distance for now.'”
Now the core women from the cast keep in touch regularly and lean on each other when they need to.
“I’m so glad I have five best friends that I can talk through it with,” Natalie said.
Though Deepti and Kyle did get together romantically in the show’s After the Altar special, by the time it aired, the couple had split up.
All five seasons of Love Is Blind are currently streaming on Netflix.
RELATED CONTENT: