The 32-year-old Netflix star opens up to ET about her breakout moments from season 3 of the reality show.
Spoiler Alert: If you haven't watched the first 10 episodes of Love Is Blind season 3, proceed with caution.
Nancy Rodriguez is the leading lady of her own story on season 3 of Love Is Blind. The 32-year-old real estate investor has proven she isn't afraid to go after what she wants or to speak her mind.
If Deepti "I Choose Myself" Vempati was season 2's feminist icon, Nancy is season 3's, turning down Andrew Liu's disingenuous proposal in favor of finding love with Bartise Bowden.
Andrew went instantly viral, asking Love Is Blind producers on camera if he could use eye drops, putting them in to produce fake tears after Nancy rejected him. Nancy tells ET that she had no idea her ex did that during his confessional, calling the moment "really cringey."
"I did not know anything about the eye drops. When I broke up with him, I knew that there was something off," Nancy tells ET. "My intuition kicked in that something was off about the genuineness of our relationship."
And though Andrew makes a brief cameo in Nancy's post-pod life, she says she hasn't spoken to him about the viral moment.
"I just wonder what was the motive? What was the reason to do that?" she questions. "I don't know."
And that wasn't the only adversity Nancy faced during her time on the show. Once she and Bartise left the pods for their romantic Malibu getaway, he confessed to her that he had a strong physical attraction to his no. 2 pick, Raven Ross. Despite his "hurtful" comments, Nancy says she still felt confident in their romance at the time.
"I think for me, I needed Bartise to really show me his true colors and see if this was going to be something that was going to continue to be an issue for us," she explains. "But the reason I was so confident is I know what I have to offer. I know who I am and I love myself. I think that's a big key point to my experience is that coming into this experience I was completely happy with myself, where I'm at either with my life, my career, my education, where I'm going, the goals that I have. I was confident coming in. So any love that I got extra from someone who I may or may not get engaged to, it was literally that. It was extra."
Nancy says she approached the pod experiment with one key question for the 15 men she dated -- "Describe to me your perfect day."
"And I think for me asking that question, instead of 'Oh, what do you do for work?' Trying to get in all the details of the guys. I just got to know what does your perfect day look like?" she says. "Even if you ask yourself that question, like, when I wake up, what would I want to do what would be my real-world dream of the perfect day? For me, it's really not having an agenda of what I was going to ask, what I was not going to ask, but genuinely just wanting to be myself and wanting to see if there was anyone else who could [duplicate] that type of energy and that was Bartise."
Once Nancy and Bartise got back to the real world, they found several fundamental differences, particularly their views on abortion. While Bartise and his family, especially his sister, are immediately against the idea of having an abortion, Nancy expresses that her own background working with children who have genetic disorders made her more open to having an abortion herself, knowing what that could do to a family.
"The way that you saw the conversation happen in our living room that's as organic as you see it," Nancy shares, saying she had not talked about the topic with Bartise in the pods.
"I think that's one thing about the phase of it all is, like, pod phase is one thing. And you're like, 'Do I even really like this person on the other side of the wall? Do they like me?'" she questions. "And once you realize like, 'Oh my gosh, yes, it's real. We're going into the next phase,' I think that's the way you see it in the living room is it's just organic."
Netflix left viewers on a cliffhanger with Nancy saying "I do," and Bartise hesitating at the altar. And while she won't give away what happens, Nancy does say that she felt the experience was genuine.
"For me the love was real. I think that so much of the women on the women's side -- I can't speak on the men's because I'm not really sure -- but on the women's side, we opened up our hearts and our minds and truly wanted to take full advantage of being selected for this process," she shares.
Love Is Blind season 3 is currently streaming the first 10 episodes on Netflix with the wedding-packed finale episode coming on Wednesday, Nov. 9.
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