Though Big Ed Brown’s feud with Rosemarie Vega took center stage on Part 1 of the Tell All, they were not the only exes to clash.
Stephanie Matto and Erika Owens are barely even speaking, but Stephanie wants to make one thing clear: she’s not lying about who she is.
There is so much to be said about 90 Day Fiance’s very first same-sex couple. Sadly, very little of it is positive.
Their relationship was a mess full of toxic fights, often brought on by Steph’s insecurities.
At Part 1 of the Tell All, both women’s friends were able to tune in to the chat to participate.
Erika’s friends were Team Erika. Steph’s friends were decidedly Team Steph.
They talk about Steph’s insecurities and her tendency to interrogate Erika’s friends.
They also get into Steph’s weirdness about Erika having a dating app — used for networking — still on her phone.
Instead of just agreeing that Steph should have worked through jealousy issues before coming to Australia, the friends get into it.
Seriously, the chaos is almost comical.
At one point, Stephanie’s friend Heather tries to justify yelling on the grounds that she is of Italian descent.
Erika reminds her that that’s a bunch of nonsense.
Then, however, Shaun Robinson speaks to both women.
She asks Stephanie if she understands why Erika was so surprised that she was so different in person than she was online.
Stephanie has a lot of somewhat sexy content online, yet when she arrived, she was distant with Erika.
This isn’t about her not putting out when they met up. Steph didn’t want to hold hands.
Her explanation is that she had thought that Erika had seen more of her YouTube channel than she actually had.
Steph insisted that one of her recent videos had touched on that before she traveled Down Under.
Shaun also asked Steph how she feels about being accused of "faking" her bisexuality.
It’s hurtful, she admits. She feels like this is part of an overarching pattern.
Stephanie even admits that she feels like she is defective at times because of how people view her.
"I know I’m bisexual," she affirms. "It’s not something that I need to prove to anybody."
Erika’s friend says that she believes that Stephanie cares about Erika, but that she doesn’t truly love her.
She reasons that Steph would have given this relationship more of a chance if she truly loved Erika.
We also learn that Stephanie has insecurities over her chronic illness.
She is afraid that others, and especially partners, will see her as a burden because of her health.
Steph lamented that she felt that Erika had not taken the time to get to know her.
As Steph once again painted herself as the victim, Erika ended up bursting into tears of frustration.
She was, she explained, tired of Stephanie acting persecuted and accusing her of being a "narcissist."
In her view, it was Steph who kept putting up walls and laying down boundaries. Erika wasn’t ignoring her, she was respecting her space.
In anticipation of the Tell All airing, Erika spoke to Entertainment Tonight.
"If I had known that a lot of the aspects of my lifestyle were dealbreakers for Stephanie," she admits, "I would have said, ‘Don’t worry about coming.’"
"This is who I am," Erika affirms, "and I’m not going to change that."
‘Like, this is how I live my life. … I travel a lot and I do a lot of things I guess regular people wouldn’t do," she characterizes.
"But," Erika laments, "Steph wasn’t OK with a lot of parts of my life."
"And," she says, "I probably would have just gone, ‘Well OK, that’s fine. I wish you would’ve told me that before you came here because I wouldn’t have entered into it, you know?’"
"Honestly," Erika acknowledges, "we didn’t sleep in the same room or even the same hotel room more than four nights."
"I didn’t actually get to spend a lot of time with her other than what you guys have seen," Erika reveals.
"You know, she is fun or whatever," she says, "but at the same time I was very taken aback by her problems."
These were problems that Steph had "with some of the dates or, you know, with my friends. …"
"When the good times were good, they were fun," Erika acknowledges, "but we just didn’t have very many of them."
"Jealousy issues, whether you’re far apart or not, they’re gonna come up," Erika says in hindsight
"If you have insecurities about your partner with a friend… I’m not gonna be with my partner 24/7 even if they’re here," she points out.
"So," Erika reasons, "it’s still gonna be a lack of trust regardless."
But while they realized that they are not compatible, Erika is shooting down anyone’s unfounded suspicions about Steph’s sexuality.
"I don’t think it’s fair for them to say that in the first place to a stranger and secondly, you know, to even make a judgment in the first place," Erika states.
"Of course, like, people can have their doubts or whatever," she allows.
"But like I’ve mentioned before," Erika affirms, "this is Steph’s journey and its no one’s place to, like, publicly go for her."
Steph not being a great girlfriend to Erika doesn’t mean that she’s not bi. It just means that she was not a great girlfriend to Erika.