Oh, baby! Bartise Bowden sent shockwaves through the Love Is Blind and Perfect Match fandom when he announced on Friday, April 7, that he became a first-time father.
“Might’ve been the villain on TV, but I’m gonna be the hero for him. Instagram, meet my little man,” the Netflix personality, 27, captioned an Instagram carousel of snaps of the newborn, including one where Bowden and his son watched an episode of Love Is Blind season 4.
The Texas resident, who appeared on season 3 of the Netflix pod experiment, added via his Instagram Story: “We went from zaddy onscreen to daddy in real life. Yep, look at that, he just spit up all over us, didn’t he?”
While Bowden did not reveal his son’s name nor the identity of the infant’s mother, several of his Netflix costars quickly offered him their congratulations.
“Bartise being the first dad after Perfect Match was not on my bingo card,” Sexy Beasts alum Kariselle Snow quipped via Instagram comment on Friday.
Bowden and Snow, 27, were both cast as contestants on Perfect Match, which dropped on Netflix in February. On the reality TV competition show, the streaming giant gave several of its fan-favorite personalities a second chance to find love following failed stints on the likes of Love Is Blind, The Circle and Too Hot to Handle. Bowden, for his part, ended the show partnered with Izzy Fairthorne before ultimately calling it quits when they returned home. Snow chose to match with former hookup Joey Sasso on Perfect Match, with the Circle champ even proposing during the finale. They also split shortly after heading home following the tropical-set competition.
Bowden joined Perfect Match less than one year after fans watched his Love Is Blind journey, which ended when he called off his engagement to Nancy Rodriguez.
“Part of the reason why I said no [is] because I only wanna make that decision one time. Let’s say I say ‘yes,’ and we encounter problems or whatever, we’re sticking together,” the senior analyst exclusively told Us Weekly in November 2022 of choosing to end his pod-based romance. “[Nancy’s] parents are divorced; my parents are divorced. I’m not going through that. So yes, if I said yes, we would still be together.”
He added at the time: “We decided to move forward trying to be friends. Fast forward a few more months, [and] now we’re both in other relationships. And I found it hard to maintain the level of friendship that Nancy wanted with me while I was also trying to be respectful of a new girl I was dating because, you know, she would get jealous that I was talking to Nancy.”
While it is unknown if Bowden is still dating his mystery girlfriend or if she is his son’s mother, the reality TV alum and his former fiancée, 32, are not on speaking terms anymore.
“I think me realizing that, as the year went by, there were just too many attempts of him trying to be a good friend that don’t align with what [I think] a good friend is,” the speech pathologist told Us in February. “I really was such a people pleaser [in my twenties] and it was always, ‘Yes,’ it was always like, ‘I will break my back for whoever, like, needs my help.’ And so, so much of this last two years … since Love is Blind, is that I’ve truly tried to find out where my boundaries are [and] hold them strong.”
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Scroll below to read the Love Is Blind and Perfect Match cast’s sweetest messages about Bowden’s baby boy: