Love is Blind season 10 twist sends one couple to Malibu, not Mexico (and here's why)

Viewers just watched seven couples get engaged in the first six episodes of Love is Blind season 10, which premiered on Netflix on Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2026.

Unfortunately, thanks to an unexpected twist, only six of the seven couples made the trip to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, for the second part of the experiment, which follows the couples during their first few days living together at a resort.

The seventh couple, Christine Hamilton and Vic St. John, were sent to a resort in Malibu with no explanation. We see them in self-recorded videos, but the couple was not followed by a camera crew like the other six couples.

Now, thanks to Love is Blind creator Chris Coelen, we finally know why, and it's definitely not for the reason I thought.

Here's why Vic and Christine were sent to Malibu

Coelen revealed to Entertainment Weekly that there were two specific reasons that the couple was not selected to come to Cabo. The first reason was the show's limited budget, which likely would have forced the show to hire additional camera and crew members to follow Vic and Christine's journey.

Here's what Coelen said about the budget constraints:

"Part of the reason that we can't follow more than normally five, and sometimes we stretch to six, is that we don't have the budget to do that. That's something I've talked about every single season, we just don't have the budget. We don't even have the budget to follow six, but we stretch, and we figure it out. And so there's absolutely no way we could do it with seven."

That part of the situation appears to be true! We've never seen a group of 14 people taken to Mexico or another destination for this part of the show. They usually have to narrow the group if more than five or six couples get engaged in the pods.

Honestly, I assumed there was some kind of passport issue. That was the first thing I thought about when I noticed that Vic and Christine were in California and not living it up in Baja California.

The second reason Coelen mentioned, and this is fascinating to me, was that Vic and Christine didn't have any loose ends with the other couples. They trimmed their list of potential suitors early and were only focused on each other while other contestants had some history that needed to be worked out on camera.

"Part of what people do when they go to Mexico is they resolve unresolved threads. That's part of the point of going to Mexico and seeing all the others, and Vic and Christine really didn't have any of those unresolved threads. So they were the ones that we picked to go on the trip by themselves."

Honestly, that makes complete sense, and as a viewer, I totally understand why the show has to make difficult choices like, but I actually feel like Vic and Christine were one of the most interesting couples on this season. I would have really liked to learn more about them, how they deal with the early conflict of living together, and how they would have interacted with the other contestants outside of the pods.

Vic and Christine will return in later episodes of Love is Blind season 10

The good news for Vic and Christine fans is that we'll get to see the rest of their love story (or non-love story, if it goes that way) play out in episode 7 and the rest of the season.

We still don't know how much they will be involved. Will a camera crew be following them 20 hours per day, or whatever it is, like the other couples? EW said they'll be a "main couple" when they get back to Ohio, which makes me think we're headed for a breakup with at least one of the couples who went to Mexico.

I'm hopeful that we'll be able to follow them all the way through to the altar, if they choose to stay in the experiment that long. In some of the more recent seasons, we've seen a lot of couples break up before the end of the show, and then we only have two or three couples going all the way to the end of the show. I know that's how life works, but that's just not exactly what fans who tune in want to see. The show works so much better as a premise when there's a chance the couples might say yes at the altar.

Vic and Christine probably have a better chance to make it than some of the other couples who went to Mexico

I don't know about you, but it feels like Vic and Christine probably have a better shot to last as a couple because they dodged the drama of Cabo. Of course, we don't know what's about to go down, but something always goes down right out of the pods for obvious reasons.

First of all, there's all that unfinished business that Coelen is referring to. There are contestants who have feelings for each other. There are others who are more attracted to other people there rather than the person they picked. Some people have a hard time handling parties and social interactions involving alcohol. Others are just having a good time, and that leads to bad times. There are so many variables that can trigger people at any time.

Vic and Christine avoid all of that, and it feels like that's probably a good thing. Yes, you could argue those other couples are going to be tested immediately out of the pods while Vic and Christine get the luxury of going through this part of their journey alone. But, I think building a foundation with fewer distractions is always going to work out on a show like this.

But, hey, that's just my perspective after binge-watching the first six episodes in one day.

We'll share more updates about Love is Blind season 10 as the season continues. The next batch of episodes arrives on Wednesday, Feb. 18, on Netflix.