Love Is Blind season 10 star Ashley Carpenter said no to marrying fiancé Alex Henderson after noticing some major “red flags.”
“It’s not the timeline [of his past relationships],” Ashley, 34, exclusively told Luxury Handbag Shopping before the Wednesday, March 11, reunion aired on Netflix. “It really was so much more. It may seem like a little lie, but when we were in the pods — although they don’t show it and I was definitely edited a certain way — he, kind of, built this fantasy in my head.”
Ashley and Alex, 31, connected sight unseen in the Love Is Blind season 10 pods, which was filmed in February 2025 and aired earlier this year.
“[His fantasy was] like we lived in Cleveland together, we went to the same restaurants, we went to the same gym and somehow we never ran into each other,” Ashley recalled. “He literally brings up The Alchemist at our engagement, saying, ‘Our treasure was basically right in front of us,’ like the book, basically. [At] that moment in the pods, I’m like, ‘Wow, this is a romance.’”
Once Ashley accepted Alex’s proposal and they met in person, she slowly started noticing things shift.
“Then you start finding out, like, ‘Well, maybe he wasn’t in Cleveland,’” she said, referring to Alex’s nomadic habit of moving around the United States or New Zealand. “This really isn’t this love story fantasy, then, wait, he was actually in Austin living with his ex. Those aren’t big lies, but [the] beautiful picture and this whole fantasy … I created in my mind from his stories is all a lie.”
Ashley added, “I am marrying this person, so if we are creating that foundation for a marriage based on possibly small white lies, that’s not really what I want.”
Ashley ultimately realized going into her wedding day that Alex likely planned to say no at the altar, so she beat him to the punch when he was asked to answer first.
“I put 110 percent [in] whatever I do. I wanted to get there, I wanted to work through things,” she told Us. “I am a fighter and if we have an argument or something or if there’s a problem I need to solve, I want to solve it. In the end, it was just [that] I couldn’t solve it. I couldn’t make him tell me the whole truth. I couldn’t help him be the man I knew I deserved — and that was on Alex.”
According to Ashley, she and Alex weren’t compatible, but she holds no bad blood for her former fiancé.
“We’re not enemies,” Ashley stressed. “There will probably never be anything romantic [but] we’re good, though. No ill will, we just weren’t a match. We went through this crazy experience together, so we’ll always kind of have that.”
Alex, for his part, told Us in a separate interview that he wished “the best” for Ashley despite a romance not being meant to be.
“[We had a] very healthy, kind of, ending at this point,” he said, acknowledging that his “complicated” explanation of his living arrangements go back to many Americans being unable to fully grasp his “nomadic lifestyle” yet.
Love Is Blind is currently streaming on Netflix.
