Chris Defends Not Carrying Huda After Their Final Love Island USA Date

The final death knell in Chris Seeley and Huda Mustafa’s heart-wrenching Love Island USA breakup wasn’t said in words, but in actions. In the Season 7 finale, the beleaguered couple called off their romance during an intimate dinner date set in the center of a shallow, candlelit pond. Before the meal, Chris carried Huda across the water, but when she asked to be carried back afterward, he refused. While Chris doesn’t regret the decision, he has thought of an alternate course of action he could have taken in that moment.

“Maybe I could have given Huda a piggyback or something like that,” Chris tells Elite Daily. “That would've been better.”

His main issue with carrying his former flame in the same way they entered was setting a clear boundary. “I'm very big on, if we're exclusive, I'm going to give you that treatment that you want. But if we're just friends, I'm not going to carry you like you're my girl,” Chris says.

He did offer to help Huda across the water, but Chris says that she put him in a difficult situation at that moment, which wasn’t fully portrayed in the episode. “I held my hand out and said, ‘I'll help you down and walk with you.’ But she gave me a choice. She was like, ‘Are you going to pick me up or are you going to make me walk?’” Chris says. “And I'm like, ‘Well, I'm not going to carry you.’ You're saying, ‘Let’s be friends.’ OK, then let's treat each other as friends."

Although some viewers took Chris walking away after the date and his general disaffected demeanor as a sign he was looking for a way out of the relationship, he emphasizes that he really did want to try to make things work with Huda in that moment.

“I wanted to work on things and try things on the outside. I don't think people really picked up on it,” Chris says. “I didn't really think we were going to end up being friends, but just based on the whole conversation, I could tell that she was leaning towards being friends. So that's why I had said, ‘OK, I'll just wait for you to say it,’ because I sensed it already.”

Now that they’re out of the villa, Chris is open to hanging out with Huda in group settings, but that’s about it. “Us hanging out as friends one-on-one, I don't think that's for the best,” he says.