“Love Is Blind”'s Lauren Suspects Dave Was Trying to 'Get Out of' Their Engagement by Fixating on Her Past Hookup (Exclusive)

Warning: this story contains spoilers from episodes 1-12 of Love Is Blind season 8.

Lauren O'Brien thinks the end of her engagement with David "Dave" Bettenberg came as a result of convenient circumstances.

The Love Is Blind stars met and developed a connection inside the season 8 pods before getting engaged sight unseen. However, things took a turn when Dave, 33, learned that Lauren, 31, had been seeing someone before coming on the show — and his inner circle happened to know the guy.

Dave then started to question Lauren's intentions and whether she was truly ready for marriage. After many arguments about her past hookup, the pair called things off in episode 11.

Now, Lauren tells PEOPLE that she thinks Dave was looking for an excuse to end their engagement.

"It did [feel like an excuse]," she says of his fixation on her past hookup. "And there were other things that came up too that were things he wanted to use to get out of it. I mean, you see him question my dad and it's his friends and it's his sister, and it's all of these things except for his inability to trust me, his inability to work through something like that in a relationship."

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Prior to the drama, Lauren says she "felt very validated" by Dave and never questioned his devotion to their relationship. However, once Dave discovered who her former flame was, she thinks things got blown out of proportion — especially since the man was nothing more than a hookup.

"I say it very clearly and I still stand by everything I said," she says. "This guy knew that I was having casting conversations the entire time that we were hooking up. And this was a friends with benefits. And I truly do think that he also saw it that way at the time."

As it turned out, several people inside Dave's inner circle knew this man. "This is coming from not only my sister, who knows this guy's best friend, but also my really close college friends that know him [and] were all telling me that they had been dating for three months, she was staying at his place the week before she left," Dave tells PEOPLE.

"I am hearing all these things and I'm just like, there's just no way I'm going to marry this person if that's what she was doing coming into it," he adds. "I just can't justify that."

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On the show, Lauren insisted many times that they weren't serious and even begged Dave to let her explain herself to his friends and family, but he never gave her the chance.

"I think it was fair of him to question me," Lauren now says. "I don't think it was fair to not let me be part of the conversation or to not hear me out."

"At the time, I will say I was really conflicted on who is in the right here. Am I not reading this right? Did I f--- up and or is Dave over-exaggerating? I really did kind of grapple with the truth, but at the end of the day I was like, I know my story and I know the narrative and I know everything about this. So I just couldn't fully see why it was breaking up an engagement," she adds.

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Though things didn't work out in her favor, Lauren says the drama gave her "the confidence that I am able to navigate difficult situations and relationships and communicate through it."

"It definitely makes me wish I had trusted that communication more in the moment because again, I think at the time I thought I was crazy and I was not communicating right," she says. "Of course, I feel like every relationship that you end, there's almost one or two things that you take into the next one that are non-negotiable deal breakers. And I think for this one, it's like I need someone to be my teammate. And I know that that's easy. Everyone's going to be like, well, of course everyone wants a teammate. But I think I'm going to have a more clear lens on what that looks like in practice moving forward."

As for whether she has any regrets from her time on the show? "No, I mean, it's so hard to look back and think about how things could look different, but it's not how I wanted my story to end, but it's absolutely how it should have ended," she says.

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Episodes 1-12 of Love Is Blind season 8 are now streaming on Netflix. The finale drops Friday, March 7, followed by the season 8 reunion on Sunday, March 9 at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT.

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