Love Is Blind's Amber Admits She Hesitated When Barnett Proposed: 'I Didn't Just Jump into It'

There’s no question that the 16 people who got engaged sight unseen on Netflix’s Love Is Blind took a massive leap of faith — but those leaps may not have been as immediate as the show made it appear.

For Amber Pike, saying yes to Matt Barnett’s proposal meant asking a few follow-up questions of her own.

“It wasn’t something that actually made the cut, but Matt’s actual proposal was so long, and my response was a lot longer than just a yes,” Amber, 25, explains to PEOPLE.

Barnett’s journey to realizing Amber was The One was a convoluted one, as he was taking his pod dates with two other women, Jessica Batten and Lauren “LC” Chamblin, seriously — and, at one point, Jessica even believed Barnett, 27, intended to propose to her.

“Because of everything that we’d gone through and how hard it was for me to get him to open up emotionally, before I said yes to him, I told him, ‘Look, I want to say yes, but I can’t say yes to you if I don’t know that this marriage is going to be something that we’re working on together. I can’t carry the weight of this emotional connection by myself. I can’t be the only one always trying to get you to open up. I need to know you’re going to be here with me working on this,'” Amber tells PEOPLE.

“I’m really proud that I didn’t just jump into it,” she adds. “I was like, ‘I need to know that you really need this. You are sure that you’re in this because we’re going to make it work.'”

Barnett’s response made it easy for Amber to say yes.

“He goes, ‘I’ll do whatever you want to make you happy. I love you,'” she recalls. “I just started crying and I was like, “Yes! Yes! I’ll marry you!”

Amber isn’t all that disappointed that the full proposal didn’t make it to air.

“The gist was all there,” she says. “It was an absolute yes.”

Nearly a year and a half later, the couple is still happily married and planning adventures together, including, eventually, a second wedding.

“I would love to do another wedding,” Amber says. “There’s no rush on it. We’re married now, but at some point … I do want to get to do a bridal shower with my family and my bachelorette trip with people I actually love and who have partied with me before.”

The entire first season of Love Is Blind is streaming on Netflix now. The reunion special, hosted by Vanessa and Nick Lachey, will be released on Netflix’s YouTube page on Thursday.

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