Everybody Loves Tila

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If you want people going crazy for love, it helps to pick folks halfway there already. “Producers actually do psychological testing to find people who are of this sort of makeup,” Pinsky explains. “But not so sick that they’re going to kill themselves or somebody else. Then they put them in an isolation tank—away from their usual anchors, in this very intense environment with someone they’re attracted to and encourage them to have intense feelings for them. Well, guess what happens? I’m surprised it’s not even worse.”

But such cold analysis finds little traction in Tequila-land. When Blender asks Nguyen to name her favorite part of the whole Shot at Love experience—the hot-tub threesomes? the Cancún zip-line?—she again breaks out the L-word. “The best part of it for me was actually falling in love,” she says. “It has its good sides and bad sides, because you fall in love with more than one person. But once it happens you feel like, Wow, this really happens.”

In the end it happened with 25-year-old Banhart, a Baldwin­ishly handsome film student from rural upstate New York. “I feel like I just got married, and we’re about to go on our honeymoon or something,” Nguyen marvels in the last episode, as the camera trails her and Banhart right up to her bedroom door. It closes discreetly on the new couple as they take a shot at love together.

Truly a Hollywood ending. So naturally, fans were crestfallen to learn this love didn’t last. “He broke up with me,” Nguyen told the crowd as she hosted MTV’s New Year’s Eve show, right before announcing there would be a second season of A Shot at Love.

What went wrong?

“Well, as time passes, he gets back into his world and I get back into mine. And we try to keep in touch, but it gets too hard for him to understand that I had a life outside of that show, I have work to do. And he’s still from … wherever he’s from.”

Worcester, New York.

“Right. So it started clashing a little bit. People like to twist the story around and make it out like the breakup was all planned, but it wasn’t.”

At least not by Banhart. Shortly after the season ended, his MySpace ran this message: “Everyone wants to know, so here it is. She never called me after the last show, and no one would give me her number, so pretty much I feel like an ass.”

Banhart responds to Blender’s e-mail with a kindly “Hey Bro” and gives us his cell number. He’s in Houston, making a nightclub appearance as Bobby B from A Shot at Love and sounds torn over just how real to keep it concerning l’affair Tequila: “Um, It’s hard for me to answer because of contract reasons.” Banhart had auditioned for the show as a lark—hardly expecting to develop feelings for the exotic host. But soon enough he was in trouble. “Everything that you guys saw was real,” he says. “None of it was scripted. They tell you reality shows are fake, but being on one firsthand, I can tell you that this one was absolutely real.”