‘Love Is Blind’ star Taylor Haag on why she almost went home, IG drama

Warning: This article contains spoilers about the first six episodes of Love Is Blind season 8.

Love Is Blind star Taylor Haag almost left the show early, and not for the reason you think.

The season 8 cast member was a big focus of the first six episodes as she dated and got engaged to fellow Christmas-loving, Minnesota single Daniel Hastings. But their love story hit a hard left turn in the dramatic cliffhanger at the end of the first batch of episodes when Taylor suspected that Daniel had previously followed her on Instagram before filming began. Since the entire premise of the show is based on falling in love without knowing what the other person looks like, she met Daniel for a tense emergency confrontation the morning after their reveal to find out the truth: did he know what she looked like the entire time in the pods?

But Taylor tells Entertainment Weekly she was actually close to calling it quits on the show much earlier than that, and it had nothing to do with her concerns about Daniel. “I almost went home — I lost my voice for three days straight and I was so frustrated,” she says. “My voice is all I have here and I’m fighting to get words out. I wasn’t really interacting with the girls in the lounge because I was trying to rest to get [my voice] back as fast as possible, so I felt like I was missing out on those interactions. I had started putting things in my bag. I was like, ‘If I don’t have a voice tomorrow, I am going to go home,’ and it came back.”

Of course, her drama was only just beginning. While Daniel’s response to her accusation isn’t shown at the end of episode 6, she says that the internet’s response since the season premiered on Friday has been brutal. “It’s been really high highs and really low lows,” Taylor says. “I’ve received quite a bit of harsh opinions… The overwhelming response that I’ve received is that I’ve made up this whole elaborate story to not look like a bad guy because I just wasn’t attracted to Daniel. It’s really shocking to me how quickly people come to these conclusions on your character based on a six-minute clip of a television show.”

Taylor promptly shoots down that theory that she was making it all up to get out of her engagement. As soon as she saw Daniel at the reveal, she was “wracking” her brain to figure out why he looked so familiar. “And then I started to think of all of the big points that brought us so close together that seemed like fate,” she says. “But then it was like, ‘Is this too good to be true?’ Which I did talk about in the pods because it was so harmonious leading up to that cliffhanger. And at that time, I was a single girl — it wasn’t uncommon for single guys to follow me on social media, it was almost like a dating app in a sense too, like meeting new people. So based on a lot of different factors, that’s kind of the conclusion I had come to in my head.”

After the reveal, Taylor spoke to producers immediately. “We had a meeting the day after with production [where they told everyone if] we’re going to continue to follow your journey or not, and in that meeting, I expressed these concerns that I was worried that he maybe knew what I looked like, which kind of just compromised the whole idea of the experiment for me,” she says. “It was something I felt like I needed to discuss with him before I felt comfortable continuing on our journey or not. So I voiced those concerns and then the meeting was set up through production.”

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Producers had Daniel meet Taylor in the lobby of her hotel about 12 hours later for an on-camera conversation. “He had no idea what we were about to discuss when he walked into that,” Taylor says. “My understanding is that they just told him I needed to speak to him before we decided the next step in our journey together, so he was very confused when he showed up for that conversation.”

While Taylor isn’t able to reveal how that cliffhanger plays out in the next batch of episodes out on Friday, she’s excited for everyone “to see what happens next” — mostly so that the internet hate finally calms down. She hopes that everyone will understand why this was such a heartbreaking fear for her. “But I am the founder and CEO of the spiraling club, I don’t know if you knew that,” she adds with a laugh. “I do that pretty well. I also talk about overthinking in the pods; hence, how the cliffhanger came to be. That’s just the way my brain works.”

As for whether Daniel did follow her on Instagram before the show, Taylor can’t say … yet. But she’s aware that fans have found a photo of his that could corroborate her story. “There’s clearly a photo the internet is taking off with on his profile,” she says. “I think it’s been shared 1,300 times since the cliffhanger.” Love may be blind, but social media definitely is not.

The first six episodes of Love is Blind season 8 are streaming now on Netflix. Episodes 7-9 debut Friday, Feb. 21; episodes 10-12 come out Friday, Feb. 28; and the finale streams Friday, March 7.