Marissa’s Mom Spoke to Ramses Off-Camera After That Love Is Blind Scene

When they first left the pods and embarked on their honeymoon, Marissa George and Ramses Prashad seemed like one of the few surefire couples destined to make it to the altar on Love Is Blind season seven. Their energy was infectious, they looked adorable next to each other, and they both reported that the sex was awesome. Yet just days before the wedding, their relationship ended in an abrupt and painful breakup — one that, according to George, was largely unilateral.

The cracks had been showing for weeks. George and Prashad found themselves at odds over the military, birth control, and family planning, and in recent episodes, he seemed apathetic at best about wedding details. Prashad expressed concern when illness prevented George from being physically intimate, and she found it concerning that his response to her PMS and vitamin D deficiency was to worry about sex. George’s friends and mother also didn’t seem wild about the match, which only further fueled viewers’ doubts.

As with much of this season of Love Is Blind, whatever directly precipitated the end of Maramses (Ramrissa?) appeared to happen off-screen. One minute, they were on a boat talking about his apparent disinterest in buying her mother flowers, and the next, they were in their apartment crying through a breakup. To get to the bottom of what, exactly, happened, I went straight to the source: George herself.

What caused your breakup? Did it stem from a bigger conversation, or did Ramses bring it up out of the blue?
I was pretty blindsided by the level of doubt and uncertainty he felt. Before that, our hardest day was us talking about a conversation he had with a family friend about how his last marriage ended and how his ex-wife had taken it. When that was brought to my attention, I had a feeling it was going to lead to some issue, but I didn’t think we were going to break up. I just thought, Okay, he’s feeling really sad about this. He feels things very deeply.

So the lead-up to this conversation, I was like, “Hey, I feel like something’s off.” I feel like that’s very typical of a man and a woman in a relationship — the man starts acting differently, and I have to come in and say, “Hey, what’s the deal?” Then he was like, “Yeah, I’m having doubts.” I don’t know if he was ever going to bring it up otherwise. 

Who were you able to meet from Ramses’s circle? We didn’t see any of that onscreen.
I met his mom through FaceTime, and she was lovely. She’s very beautiful and very nice. I met his brother and his niece, and then I met his closest friend, David, who was at the tux fitting. And I also met two of his close girl friends — girls that are friends, not ex-girlfriends. Those meetings went really well. They talked a lot about how, yes, they noticed a difference in our energy, but they thought it was very complementary. And Ramses was so sure until he wasn’t, right? It didn’t seem like any of his friends asked him that. I think his brother might have, but that was the day before the breakup.

That’s so jarring. 
It was so jarring! I’m not gonna lie. Had he told me throughout the process, “Oh, yeah, I love you, babe, but there are some things we need to figure out before I move on,” that would have helped with the breakup. But when someone’s looking you in the face every day, multiple times a day, saying, “I’m 100 percent in,” it’s jarring to hear, all of a sudden, “Not only do I no longer want to get married to you — I don’t want to date you anymore. I don’t want to do anything anymore.”

At that point, you feel like your world’s upside down, really. You’re like, “Am I freaking crazy?” 

As a viewer, that conversation highlighted a lot of moments in retrospect — like when you’d bring up wedding planning and he’d seem apathetic. Did the breakup recontextualize anything you might have initially brushed aside?
Yeah, as I watched it back, I could definitely see Ramses slipping away. I could tell in his lack of enthusiasm. Initially, he was like, “I want to be all involved,” and then toward the end, I was doing everything. And it wasn’t like I had all this free time to do it, but I was like, “If I don’t do it, then who’s going to?” He wasn’t answering wedding-planning emails, so I was like, “Okay, well, I guess while I’m in class, I’ll sit here and go through my emails and answer stuff and figure things out.”

In the moment, I brushed things aside because I took him at face value. I’m saying, “Hey, if you have any doubts, let’s talk about it. If you do, that’s okay, it’s not going to end in us breaking up, but we could talk about it.” And if he’s saying, “No, no doubts, no doubts,” then what am I supposed to do? Look at him and say, “Well, you’re lying?” 

I guess I could have said, in hindsight, “Well, I know you’re saying you have no doubts, but you’re not really showing up in this way.” But I’m also thinking, “This is part of the experiment. He’s overwhelmed and stressed by filming and all the moving pieces.” I just felt like I needed to step up to help him there. 

After the breakup, you called your mom to talk through it. What did she say to you when you told her the wedding was off?
Oh, she was actually pretty devastated for me, just because I was devastated. When I called her, she was about an hour away from me and Ramses because the wedding was in a couple days and she was driving up to stay the night. Her initial response was, “All right, so let me talk to him.” And I was like, “No, you’re going to friggin’ bitch him out!”

But in actuality, she went and privately spoke to him off-camera, saying, “Please don’t do this to my daughter. You guys clearly do love each other. What is going on?” Just trying to get him to see reason — that it’s scary but we could do this. Her response was actually a lot different than I thought it would be. 

So, to confirm, that breakup was a complete split — not just postponing the wedding?
It was a complete split. I gave him the option, because he kept saying, “I love you. I want to be with you. My heart wants to be with you, but I have to be logical here — I can’t follow my emotions.” I was like, “Okay, let’s be logical. We don’t have to do the marriage. We could just stay engaged.” Or, “We don’t have to stay engaged. We could just date.” And I didn’t really want to break up, to be honest. But I was willing to meet him at a place where he was never willing to meet me. He’d already made his decision. I really had no say in this breakup.

This lack of room for discussion does make me think of Ramses’s seemingly uncompromising opposition to condoms. What did you make of that resistance, and were you eventually able to find some kind of resolution?
We decided to keep doing what we were doing, which was I tracked my menstrual cycle, and we made sure during my ovulation time that we were careful — either using a condom or abstaining. We did talk about vasectomy. He actually was like, “Whoa, I need to think about that. Most men don’t have to think about that.” It kind of addressed this privilege that he never needed to think about it.

I knew it was bad at the time, but looking at it from the rearview, I literally said, “Either wear a condom or accept the consequences,” and he didn’t want to do either. Looking back, I’m like, Okay, if I ended up pregnant, would it be “my fault”? Would he have said, “Well, I told you that I don’t want to have kids”? I don’t know.

From what we’ve seen, it looked like you were left in an impossible situation.
It did, right? Like, we still didn’t use condoms, and again, that was because I was willing to accept the consequences of not using protection. I was naïve in that sense. Now that I’m working on some of my people-pleasing, compromising tendencies, I would have said, “Well, if you aren’t willing to have a child in the next year, then we will use condoms or we won’t be having sex.”

What did your friends say when you told them you and Ramses had broken up?
They were livid, to be honest. I mean, they still are to this day. I think that, for them, they were already making concessions, allowing this person in their life as my future husband. They didn’t love how judgmental he was regarding divorce and the military, but they also loved seeing us together. They said they saw the love between us, and they saw how much I was in love and how much he did love me, so they were supporting it. But once we broke up, they were furious about how it came about. They hated that aspect, and they hated how much it broke me, so they hate that man.

I will say, I watch a lot of dating shows, and this breakup is one of the most painful I’ve ever seen. How did you heal yourself from it?
It’s probably the most heartbroken I’ve ever felt. I don’t really recall much of the two days after the breakup. I cried a lot. I couldn’t speak, honestly. I didn’t really want to exist, and I felt that way not because Ramses and I weren’t together — that obviously hurt and that devastated me — but my brain shut down because I couldn’t understand how I didn’t see it coming. I felt very dumb and very stupid. It made me question everything I’ve worked on in therapy for many years.

I would say it took me probably about six months to finally feel like somewhat of a normal person again. I had to stop drinking. I was drinking a lot, I was going out a lot, and my behavior was kind of reckless. And I recognized that and took a break from all that. Obviously, I went to therapy. And I surrounded myself with my friends and family. That’s how I coped.