He chose not to tie the knot with Nancy Rodriguez on Love Is Blind, and then he realized Izzy Fairthorne wasn’t his Perfect Match, but Bartise Bowden has a new love in his life: his new son.
Bartise revealed on Instagram on April 7 that he’s the father to a baby boy. “Might’ve been the villain on TV, but I’m gonna be the hero for him,” he wrote in his Instagram caption. “Instagram, meet my little man. #bigfella.”
In the post, Bartise shared a slideshow of him and his son, including a video of the duo watching Tiger Woods compete in The Masters and a photo of them watching Love Is Blind.
Bartise also posted a video of him and his son to his Instagram Stories. “We went from ‘zaddy’ on screen to ‘daddy’ in real life,” he said, before realizing the infant had added some spit-up to his shirt.
“He’s a little camera shy, just like his daddy is,” Bartise quipped in that clip.
So far, Bartise hasn’t revealed how old the baby is or who the mother is, much to fans’ befuddlement.
“The math ain’t mathing,” one Instagram user wrote in a comment on Bartise’s birth announcement. “He did two shows back to back — wouldn’t that mean he left [a] girl pregnant at home to go find someone else on a dating show?”
Another commenter wrote, “I’m gonna need you internet detectives to figure this one out.”
On Season 3 of Netflix’s Love Is Blind, Bartise proposed to Nancy but called off the nuptials at the altar. Afterward, he told TV Insider he got why his would-be bride didn’t want to see him after the canceled wedding. “I understand exactly where she was coming from,” he said. “That was the ultimate moment of our relationship being able to blossom after the altar, and she said yes and I said I do not. Just like she said, it was black and white. I respected her thoughts there, and if she doesn’t want anything to do with me, that makes sense.”
Bartise later starred on the Netflix dating show Perfect Match alongside fellow stars from Love Is Blind and other Netflix reality shows. He dated Izzy from Too Hot to Handle during that competition, but the duo later broke up, as People reported in March.