During my time as a Talent Coordinator at Scale Management, I ghostwrote an essay for our client, Giannina Milady Gibelli, the breakout star of Netflix’s Love is Blind for Playboy Magazine.
After the first season of Love Is Blind aired in 2020 and rose to the top of the cultural conversation, with Giannina emerging as one of the series’ breakout stars, Playboy Magazine reached out with an opportunity for Giannina to pen an essay opening up about her experience in love, sex, and dating.
While Giannina was excited at the opportunity to be featured in Playboy Magazine, she was not confident in her writing ability, so I was tasked with writing the article on her behalf in her voice. I conducted a sprawling phone interview with Giannina, transcribing key quotes and absorbing her tone and voice to write this essay as her.
The resulting essay I penned as Giannina is copied and linked below:
‘Love Is Blind’ Star Giannina Gibelli Embraces Sex and Faces Fear
Apr 24, 2020The Netflix standout pens an essay for Playboy about why she stayed with Damian and how they keep the spark alive during quarantine
My name is Giannina Milady Gibelli, and I fell in love in the pods.
For nine days, my only job and purpose was to find love. It wasn’t to win prize money or even fame: Our lives centered on forging and fostering deep connections. Our devices were locked away, our daily lives were on pause and the outside world was turned off. I met a man named Damian, and we opened our hearts to each other. He tried to propose to me, then I proposed to him. He said yes. We had never laid eyes on each other.
Nine days in isolation. Nine days singularly devoted to getting to know someone—all of that person—and to sharing your story, to describing the threads that weave together the fabric of you. And then we met. I had to mentally introduce his adonic figure to the soul it was sculpted around. Then I spent a month exploring that adonic figure, and the man inside it, in Mexico. We moved in together in Atlanta, we fought, we fucked, we walked down the aisle.
I said, “I do.”
He said, “I do not.”
“For all the little things he does to surprise me in our relationship, he does just as much in bed.”
After filming our season of Love Is Blind, Damian and I lived about an hour away from each other. We went from being together all the time and focusing on nothing but us to—boom!—back to our old lives. But I didn’t feel like myself anymore.
We took a breather, and then we started again—from scratch but with a head start. I knew this person, and I knew I loved this person, but we didn’t know each other outside our fantastical bubble. We saw an opportunity to start over and take advantage of everything we’d already been through. We started to sprinkle each other into our lives and rebuild day by day.
People say, “How can you ever forgive him after he turned you down at the altar?” And I say, I look at it like a real person. He had one month to make the most consequential decision of his life—a decision that had also been tough for me to make throughout most of the process.
Rebuilding after the cameras stopped rolling was such a hard time for Damian and me. It felt like our worlds had turned upside down. But we were the only two people in the universe who understood what we’d been through, so even though it rocked us, we got closer to one another. That’s true of life in general: When you experience something together, be it with a friend or a lover, it deepens your bond. Even if it’s just an inside joke, you both “had to be there” to know why it’s funny.
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‘Love Is Blind’ Star Giannina Gibelli Embraces Sex and Faces Fear
Bijan Nasseri
Apr 24, 2020 6 min read
The Netflix standout pens an essay for Playboy about why she stayed with Damian and how they keep the spark alive during quarantine
Written by
SEXUALITY IN CONVERSATION
My name is Giannina Milady Gibelli, and I fell in love in the pods.
For nine days, my only job and purpose was to find love. It wasn’t to win prize money or even fame: Our lives centered on forging and fostering deep connections. Our devices were locked away, our daily lives were on pause and the outside world was turned off. I met a man named Damian, and we opened our hearts to each other. He tried to propose to me, then I proposed to him. He said yes. We had never laid eyes on each other.
Nine days in isolation. Nine days singularly devoted to getting to know someone—all of that person—and to sharing your story, to describing the threads that weave together the fabric of you. And then we met. I had to mentally introduce his adonic figure to the soul it was sculpted around. Then I spent a month exploring that adonic figure, and the man inside it, in Mexico. We moved in together in Atlanta, we fought, we fucked, we walked down the aisle.
I said, “I do.”
He said, “I do not.”
For all the little things he does to surprise me in our relationship, he does just as much in bed.
After filming our season of Love Is Blind, Damian and I lived about an hour away from each other. We went from being together all the time and focusing on nothing but us to—boom!—back to our old lives. But I didn’t feel like myself anymore.
We took a breather, and then we started again—from scratch but with a head start. I knew this person, and I knew I loved this person, but we didn’t know each other outside our fantastical bubble. We saw an opportunity to start over and take advantage of everything we’d already been through. We started to sprinkle each other into our lives and rebuild day by day.
People say, “How can you ever forgive him after he turned you down at the altar?” And I say, I look at it like a real person. He had one month to make the most consequential decision of his life—a decision that had also been tough for me to make throughout most of the process.
Rebuilding after the cameras stopped rolling was such a hard time for Damian and me. It felt like our worlds had turned upside down. But we were the only two people in the universe who understood what we’d been through, so even though it rocked us, we got closer to one another. That’s true of life in general: When you experience something together, be it with a friend or a lover, it deepens your bond. Even if it’s just an inside joke, you both “had to be there” to know why it’s funny.
Courtesy: Netflix
Everyone in the cast feels the same way, which is why we’re all still close. We experienced this crazy thing together in different ways and reacted to it in different ways. Personally, I went inward; the show displayed the ways I would respond to situations and problems, and it forced me to face them.
So I entered this new phase of our relationship as a more evolved Giannina. I fell deeper and deeper in love with him, and at the same time I was gaining trust in who I am after putting myself through so much. The more I fell in love with him, the more I tried to push him away. But he knew that I push people away to protect myself from potential pain. So he would find new ways to show me that I didn’t need to fear that with him.
When I was younger, I would picture the ways I wanted a lover to treat me and speak my love language—and Damian speaks that language fluently. He is like Noah from The Notebook: He will show up on your doorstep with flowers, he will fix the wobbly leg on your dining chair without being asked, he will remember things you said two weeks ago to surprise you with something thoughtful.
We had about a year to reconstruct our relationship and our life together before the show aired. The lights, the cameras, the action go away, and then you realize your soul is out there and about to be put on full display. What’s going to happen to my soul? I was petrified, but when our private-life bubble finally popped and the world saw my soul, the sense of relief made things better.
“We love to feel each other near, and our favorite time is when we’re wrapped up in each other.”
I thought I was afraid of other people’s reactions to me and my experience. But watching the show air, I realized I wasn’t afraid to watch it for other people’s opinions; I was afraid to face myself, to watch myself try to push Damian away, to relive the fights and the “I do nots.”
Seeing myself go through those tough times was mortifying and beneficial all at once. To put it another way, it hurt so good. Our memories often lie to us—we remember only certain details, we have only our own perspective and we can’t see the scene for what it was. In a weird way, being able to play back the ugly and painful scenes was more therapeutic than I could have imagined. I could see those monstrous memories for what they were. This fight wasn’t as nasty as I remembered, and my behavior wasn’t as embarrassing as I’d built it up to be.
It was a blessing that there was such a gap between filming and airing, because I had already gone through more than a year of coming to terms with everything that happened during the shoot, working through it and building up the strength to learn from it. People don’t usually get to see their first fights with their significant others, because those moments don’t make it to the photo album. But Damian and I had this whole scrapbook: the good, the bad and the ugly. It made everything even more beautiful.
“Damian speaks my love language fluently. He’s like Noah from The Notebook.”
Because of the show, I now have this strange opportunity for people to see the love he gave to me, to fall in love with us as a couple and to share their love for our love. There’s something about reading thousands of tweets, comments and messages about how beautiful, sweet and sexy your man is that makes you more attracted to him than ever.
I look at him on-screen, and I look over to him next to me, and I just see this big, beautiful Greek god of a man. One of the things I would fantasize about was having someone who could pick me up and throw me against the wall—in a naughty way, not a violent one. Now here he is, like a sexy lumberjack with hands twice the size of mine, and I can climb him like a tree. For all the little things he does to surprise me in our relationship, he does just as much in bed. We’re not afraid to have frank conversations about our sex life, describing in detail how everything feels to make it even better. And now that we’re living through the stay-at-home order, we find ways to keep our spark glowingly alive.
I’ve been through three quarantines now. The first was my experience in the pods: I was in a room by myself, separated from Damian by a wall, and I had nothing to fear or worry about. The second was after filming wrapped and I had quit my job, and Damian and I were taking a breather—I was bound up in fear. Now Damian and I are sheltering in place together, and it feels like a combination of the previous two: I fear for our health, the impact on our world and how will we get out of it, but at the same time I now know how to use this time for good.
Even though this quarantine is the scariest of all three, going through it with Dame makes it so much sweeter. We love to feel each other near, and our favorite time is before we’re about to go to sleep, when we’re wrapped up in each other. And with the stay-at-home order, we don’t have to wait until we’re about to go to sleep to experience that.
There are random things he does that bother me—he won’t close the cupboard, he leaves the shower curtain open—and they drive me crazy. But then he’ll take the trash out or fix my curtain rod, and those moments make me forget the little things that may irk me.
I walked into this relationship blindly. But now I see everything so clearly. And one thing is the clearest of all: I love all the ways Damian loves me.