Photo: COURTESY OF NETFLIX/COURTESY OF NETFLIX
We’ve all had that moment, haven’t we? You’re happy as a clam, secure in the knowledge that you’re engaged to the world’s best fiancé, and WHAM. All of a sudden, you’re reading kinky texts to another woman on his phone. This week on Love Is BlindMonica Davis learned a lot about Stephen Richardson, who apparently couldn’t even make it to the altar before cheating on her via text. But as with most reality-TV discoveries, this revelation left us with more questions than answers. Chief among them: Who goes to a sleep test drunk? (And was he really drunk?)
Naturally, Davis wouldn’t give us much intel about where she and Richardson stand now (that’s for the reunion, sillies!), but she did give us the lowdown on when things started to feel off, how she found the texts, and, perhaps most important, the memo he left on his parting Venmo payment.
When did things start to feel off with Stephen in Mexico?
When you see the scene when we’re at the restaurant in Mexico, I think it’s episode seven, that was a very, very difficult moment for me.
I was really taken aback. Stephen was feeling very overwhelmed, which I get. I was overwhelmed too. We’re actually thinking about getting married in a couple of weeks, and we’re in a different country, and things are happening so quickly. On the drive over to the restaurant, he actually talked a lot about about how he was feeling and about potential concerns related to how fast the wedding was coming up, and we were like, “Let’s just use this lunch to have a good time. Let’s have fun.”
And then when we sat down at the restaurant, we weren’t there for more than five minutes and he hits me with the same thing we’d just spent hours talking about. I was so — I mean, I say it, I’m like, “What the fuck?” Can we not have fun together? Really, does everything have to be so heavy all the time?
So, you get home. You’re living together. How, exactly, did you find the texts?
All of us couples who are engaged are living in the same apartment building. That day, Taylor and Garrett sent a text to all of us saying, “Hey, guys, we’re going to be making fall cookies for everyone today, and we’re going to drop them by your apartment later.”
It was nighttime at this point. Stephen and I had a long day. We’re having so much fun in the kitchen — laughing, videotaping each other. We were expecting Taylor and Garrett to reach out to us sometime soon, and he steps into the bathroom. Shortly thereafter, his phone lights up and it’s a text from Garrett, and I’m like, “Oh, babe, you just got a text from Garrett saying they are going to drop off the cookies soon. I got it.” I go to respond to the message, I’m in his messages, and next thing you know, I see a girl’s name at the top of it.
Yikes.
I mean, I truly would never have expected this from this relationship — which, I know now, seeing everything, might sound a little crazy. Stephen and I talked a lot about infidelity and cheating and my history with it, and so I felt really safe in this regard. So I felt like, don’t even click on her name. But I’m so glad I did. I felt like I only had a minute to decide, and I pushed it and, boom, it was all there.
And just to be clear, he said this happened because he’d gone to a sleep test … drunk?
It’s so funny watching it back. I heard that, too, and I’m like, “That sounds crazy.” But, yeah, he had this sleep test on his schedule for a long time. It was something that he needed to do with regards to, like, being a veteran and his disability. It had been on his books for a while, and that day we also went on a date. So he had some drinks and went to his sleep test.
I personally think that the phrase “drunk at a sleep test” is a scapegoat. He was not drunk. He’d had a few drinks, but he was just making an excuse, like, “Oh, I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Were there any moments from the pods or Mexico that felt recontextualized when you saw the texts? Maybe things you’d shrugged off that jumped out afterward?
Sure, looking back, there were things. In the pods, I was someone who really was trying not to have in-depth sexual conversations. Stephen and I had some, like, pretty basic ones, but I had no idea of the extent of what I saw in the text messages.
But I do remember thinking back to the women’s lounge and recalling a couple of the girls making comments, like, “Yeah, I don’t think I’m really into that Stephen guy. I’m putting him near the bottom of my list, because he was super-freaky in there.”
I did wonder — during the fireworks night in Mexico, Stephen had that weird pivot to talking about, like, home-wrecking women wanting to have oral sex with men who’ve been on reality TV. That moment felt very odd and left field to me as a viewer. Did it make any more sense in context?
I thought it was a humor thing for a long time, like he was just trying to be funny. Sex jokes, vulgar, explicit, ugh — just not my humor. And then there were moments where I was like, “Wait, he’s not joking. I think he’s being serious.”
Of course, after I saw the texts, a lot of it was like, “Oh, he was actually being serious.” He might not have felt totally comfortable sharing with me what his hopes, dreams, and desires were sexually, right? But he started to kind of bread crumb a little bit when I think back on it, to maybe gauge my temperature.
Sure, like saying he wanted to be treated like a piece of meat?
Exactly. And you see the read on my temperature. I was like, What the hell? How did we get here? How did we get to this point in the conversation?
I believe your exact words, in fact, were, “How did we get here?” Stephen seemed to have a couple tangents like that one. I wondered if the ones we saw on the show were the extent of it, or if they were a consistent habit of his.
It was increasingly consistent, right? Like, it wasn’t there at first, and over time it was definitely gradually increasing.
Do you remember what the Venmo note was on his payment to you?
It was something so classic for how he was behaving in that moment, which was a little bit like, “Woe is me.” I think it said “I’m the biggest piece of shit” 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.”
That tracks.
I was rolling my eyes so hard in that moment.
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