She’s catching their eyes.
“Love Is Blind” star Madison Maidenberg got dumped by her fiancé on TV — and as soon as the breakup episode aired, she received social media messages from men hoping to date her.
Maidenberg, 28, who was diagnosed at 21 with a rare condition called retinitis pigmentosa, which causes a gradual loss of vision, revealed the one pickup line that really got her attention.
“Last night this guy was like, ‘Baby girl, he broke your heart. But I will help you when you’re blind, mi amor,’” Maidenberg told The Post on Thursday, the day after the shocking episode dropped on Netflix.
Since she appeared on the reality dating series, she’s gained close to 24,000 Instagram followers and received hundreds of messages from people with retinitis pigmentosa, thanking her for raising awareness for the affliction, which affects roughly 1.5 million people worldwide.
“I had this one guy, it was so sweet. He was at a dark bar. Somebody went to shake his hand and he obviously didn’t see it because we have a hard time with peripherals,” she recalled.
And the person noticed and said, ‘Do you have what that girl from ‘Love Is Blind’ has?’”
In the second episode of Season 9 of “Love Is Blind,” which airs its finale on Oct. 22, Maidenberg explained to her future fiancé Joe Ferrucci that her condition “can lead to blindness.”
“In low light situations, my peripherals are very, very difficult to see … so if I’m looking at somebody’s eyes and I’m talking to them, I’m likely not seeing below their nose,” she told The Post. “And then on top of that, I see what I call TV static. It’s almost like a filter over my vision all the time, which also makes it very difficult with depth perception.
“So I miss stairs a lot of times … I trip and fall a lot.”
The brunette beauty applied to the series — where singles date each other through walled-off pods, never seeing what the other looks like until after they’re engaged — after she heard it was casting in her hometown of Denver.
“I was like, ‘Gosh, I would love to be able to experience that and kind of get a taste of what my life could be if I lost my vision.’”
Maidenberg, who works as a digital designer, ended up getting engaged to Ferrucci, a sales exec, who — after finally seeing her — told her he usually courted “more petite women,” which caused her to develop an eating disorder.
“Obviously, like many women, I had my own insecurities about my body. But his comments triggered something in me that really brought that disordered eating forward,” she said.
“I’m no longer struggling with that eating disorder, but I still struggle with the thoughts that come with it.”
She’s slimmed down since filming, which ended in mid 2024, but declined to reveal how much weight she lost.
“I think that the biggest thing to take into account here is that I am healthier than I’ve ever been. I am so proud of the body that has carried me for 28 years, and that is what deserves to be celebrated rather than a number on a scale.”
Maidenberg also dished that she has seen Ferrucci since the split.
“We met up to get dinner. … We say goodbye. … We kind of start making out and he starts tearing up. … So I texted him after we left, ‘Why did you tear up? And he was like, ‘I don’t know, that was weird.’”
In a new interview with US Weekly, Ferrucci downplayed their relationship, admitting they shared “a strong, physical connection,” but adding, “I think that and fighting were the only two things we did.”
“I was shocked by that. … There were many moments that, like any couple, we were laughing, we were connecting, we were having a good time,” Maidenberg said.
“And to see him continue this narrative of minimizing me and our relationship is sad because that is absolutely not true.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source celebrity.land ’
