Love Is Blind’s Nick slams Hannah’s ‘completely false’ opinion of him: ‘I am very respectful’

Breakups suck, but Nick Dorka was really put through the ringer when Hannah Jiles ended their relationship on Love Is Blind.

Instead of trying on wedding dresses and tuxes, Hannah told Nick they needed to have a serious conversation and ultimately broke off their engagement before they could get to the finale. In her brutally direct way, Hannah said Nick didn’t match her intellectually, creatively, financially, or any other way. She went through her list of his five flaws that she had written down in Mexico and told him that he hadn’t worked on or fixed any of them. She also said she didn’t feel like she knew the “real” him and was manipulated. But now, after watching their breakup and all her comments about him in episode 11, Nick is slamming her opinion as “completely false.”

“I am as intellectual as her,” he tells Entertainment Weekly. “I’m not the type to say, ‘I’m better than you at this, this, and that.’ Clearly, I felt like I wasn’t an equal in the relationship, and throughout the show I was understanding and respectful and mature and sincere and financially literate.”

Nick points out that to have his career in real estate, he has to be financially literate. “I look at contracts and numbers, and help my clients, and serve them at a high level,” he says. “I graduated from William & Mary with two great degrees — one of the best schools in the country. The things she was saying, I didn’t agree with, but at that point, I realized there’s nothing I could really do to save the relationship.”

One of the main points Hannah kept coming back to was how Nick was disrespectful towards her, and he now calls that “ironic” considering the way she treated him throughout their engagement.

“I was raised the right way by my parents,” he says. “I was always told to treat people, especially women, with respect. The duck situation wasn’t really that deep, I was just having fun with it, but she felt it was disrespectful. I had a conversation with Katie at the Halloween party, and it was very mature and respectful, but she thought it was disrespectful. I think maybe she had some issues or insecurities, we all do, but some problems that she had to address with herself and her friends and that were getting [projected] on me.”

Nick continues, “I was a genuine, stand-up guy the whole time. I am very respectful. I am attentive. I think one of my best traits is being socially aware and reading rooms. I am intelligent… Not ‘delulu.’ Some people did look a little ‘delulu’ at times, but not me.”

Speaking of being “disrespectful,” he also points out how Hannah had a conversation with season 7 cast member Ashley Adionser about their sex life — in excruciating detail — despite his request to keep that topic private. “I would never say that on camera, and I guess that just goes to show that we’re different in a lot of ways,” he says. “Friends are supposed to be there to talk to about those things, but certain details in a relationship, especially sexually, I would never really be that upfront and forthcoming with. I wouldn’t be on camera talking with Garrett or Ty about something like that and bashing her like that.”

Nick adds, “I don’t think a lot of it was necessarily true. I think I’m a great partner, but that was her side of the story.”

Hannah deciding to end their engagement before the finale weddings didn’t come as a surprise to Nick. “It was a little unfortunate we didn’t get to go through that, but we were mature enough to call it quits when we did and not draw it out anymore,” he says. “As you can see from the show, Hannah is a very strong independent woman, likes to speak her mind, and it’s hard to sway her opinion. So I knew when she called me up that the conversation wasn’t going to be a good one and we were probably going to be done. I knew at that moment that if she had made up her mind, chances are she probably wouldn’t change her opinion.”

In the episode after their breakup, Nick mentions that he would have liked to have made it to the end of the experiment. But would he have said “I do” at the altar?

“I was taking it day by day, moment by moment,” he says. “I don’t want to speak for Hannah, but I feel like she was maybe just a little bit further in the process. I was fully committed. I wanted to make it work, and I didn’t want to be so close-minded to cut it off early. We clearly had a connection, and we had some important events coming up, and I wanted to see if we could just work on the things we needed to work on. We both were really invested in the relationship, and I wanted to try and get to the point where she was and use every moment with her. Unfortunately it didn’t work out, but looking back on it, maybe it was for the best.”

He also doesn’t think the timing of their breakup was a coincidence, since it happened the very next day after his disastrous meeting with her friends.

“Hannah told me, ‘I’m very independent. I don’t really care what my friends or my family think. I’m going to do exactly what I want to do,'” Nick says. “But then in the pods, she broke up with me because her friends were telling her to and she listened to them. And then this is another instance where she got swayed by her friends’ opinions, so I was a little confused. Some of the things she was saying were a little bit different than what she was doing.”

What was “pretty consistent throughout,” however, was the way in which Hannah spoke to Nick. That’s why he wasn’t surprised to see everything she said about him in all the episodes.

“I just wish she could have given me a little bit more grace in certain situations, be a little bit more understanding,” he says. “I try to be as patient as possible. It is hard in that situation to see exactly where she’s coming from. I just wanted to make it work and unfortunately it didn’t.”

Despite how the season ended for him, Nick has “no regrets at all” about going on Love Is Blind. “The point is to find love, but you do a lot of soul-searching and you really grow as a person as well,” he says. “I found some things that I never really would’ve known. I wouldn’t change anything — I think everything played out how it was supposed to.”