Love Is Blind star Amy Cortés is speaking out after her reluctance to take birth control left some viewers flummoxed.
After Amy and podmate Johnny McIntyre got engaged on season 6 of the Netflix reality series — sight unseen, of course — they headed home to Charlotte, North Carolina, to begin their lives together.
Once there, however, they ran into a major roadblock when Amy revealed she was unwilling to take birth control, despite the couple both acknowledging that they weren’t ready to start a family.
“It was more so what I would be putting into my body that I just didn’t feel comfortable with,” Amy explained to Entertainment Weekly about her decision. “Fully support it for any woman who decides to do it. I feel like women should be empowered to do what they feel like is best for them. But in that moment I just felt like I didn’t want to do that. So we explored other options.”
As seen on the show, those options included Johnny getting a vasectomy (they decided against it). According to Amy, they had discussions about other forms of contraception, including condoms, that weren’t shown on screen.
“We definitely had conversations about a little bit of everything,” she said, “and I feel like condoms are a sense of birth control in that sense.”
Amy admitted she was not prepared for the kind of controversy her contraceptive decision-making skills would stoke with viewers, saying, “I didn’t expect it to be as big of a deal.”
“Obviously it is a huge deal, especially if you’re considering to marry somebody,” she continued. “But [Johnny] hadn’t been with somebody in the past that wasn’t on birth control, so I feel like for him it was more of a shock, which was more of a shock for me as well because I feel like I know so many women that are not on birth control.”
The e-commerce specialist concluded, “It was just definitely very different based on both of our experiences.”
Outside of the birth control kerfuffle, Amy and Johnny were on the fast track to the altar in the latest batch of episodes released Wednesday, February 21.
The couple even learned the Dominican dance style of bachata, which Johnny told the instructors he and his fiancée are hoping to show off at their wedding.
The first nine episodes of Love Is Blind season 6 are available to stream now on Netflix, with two more episodes hitting the platform Wednesday, February 28, before the season finale drops Wednesday, March 6.
