Love Is Blind’s Madison Matched With Fellow Contestant Casandra on Hinge Before Season 8

Love Is Blind season 8 standout Madison Errichiello matched with another contestant on a dating app before going into the pods.

“When we got off our flight, all the girls met up at the airport [before going into the experiment] and me and Madison recognized each other,” Casandra Barron told MPR News on Thursday, March 13. “I couldn’t quite picture it, where I had known her. Then, she comes up to me at breakfast and she goes, ‘Do you remember we matched on Hinge, like, a year ago?’”

Casandra, 30, said she started following Madison, 28, after their missed dating app connection.

“I was like, ‘I know we’re following each other on Instagram, but how?’” she continued. “But we had matched on Hinge the year before. And she was like, ‘If this doesn’t work out, let’s [date each other].’ Now, we’re best friends, so it’s great.”

Madison and Casandra both filmed Love Is Blind season 8 in Minneapolis in spring 2024, which premiered on Netflix last month. Casandra’s reality TV stint, however, was brief.

“She was there for, like, a day and then she left,” Madison said on the “Off the Vine” podcast earlier this month. “Good for her because she was so unimpressed [with the cast].”

When Madison saw Casandra in the airport, she realized right away that they once matched on Hinge.

“At first I was kind of nervous [to say something],” Madison, who is openly bisexual, said on the Tuesday, March 11, podcast episode. “The gay panic set in and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, do I say something [or] do I not?’ Then I just ended up saying something.”

She continued, “I also didn’t know how comfortable she was and I didn’t want to say anything on camera either.”

Madison went on to form pod bonds with Alex Brown and Mason Horachek, but she ultimately left the show single. While she did speak about her sexuality in the pods, it wasn’t shown in the final Netflix edit.

Now that the show has wrapped, Madison and Casandra’s connection has remained platonic.

“She’s one of my besties now,” Madison said on Tuesday. “She kind of had a thing [and] she was on and off with this one guy and I think when she got to the pods, she was like, ‘Oh, I miss him.’ So, coming back, we’re just always besties.”

Madison briefly rekindled her romance with Alex, 29, in person, but things didn’t work out.

“We talked when we got out of the pods. We got back to Minneapolis and we did talk for a brief period of time, I would say, and then the same issues kept coming up,” he said on “The Viall Files” podcast in February. “We realized, again, that we were communicating differently and then we decided to go our separate ways.”

Love Is Blind is currently streaming on Netflix.