There are clues about Harry and Melinda’s not-so-secret smooch before, during, and after the finale.
Do you think Harry Jowsey’s therapist watched Perfect Match and sighed? In the latest season of Netflix’s reality dating competition, Harry swore that he was a changed man. Armed with therapyspeak and self-help books, he felt ready to shed his Too Hot to Handle past as a toxic playboy. (“Harry has a reputation for not being great with women. The Netflix ex-wives do a tell-all for sure,” fellow Perfect Match contestant Dominique said in the first episode.) Harry ended up trying to convince Jessica that he was good enough to be her future husband and stepfather for her teenage daughter that she didn’t find on her season of Love Is Blind. But Harry’s redemption arc was cut short once he got wrapped up in a he-said-she-said argument over whether or not he kissed Melinda. Despite the two contradictory stories about what happened, there are clues before, during, and after the finale that point to the truth — not only did Harry kiss Melinda; he attempted to engage in a flop of a cover-up afterward. How did Netflix clue us in from the start? Here’s all the evidence we can make out about this make-out.
Setting the Scene (The Mixer, Part One)
In episode eight, the men are separated from their matches and are sent to a mixer with all the former single women contestants. In the footage:
This establishes that Harry and Melinda are behaving in a way that other people at the mixer do not interpret as platonic. Holly is also a potential firsthand eyewitness. Melinda is still attached to Harry — when would she have had a chance to go feed Holly a lie? (“I saw the kiss ????????,” Holly later confirmed on TikTok.)
Harry’s Testimony
When Melinda brings up the kiss to Harry at the mixer, he says with a laugh that she’s “making shit up” and tells her not to “get [him] in trouble.” Once the group begins questioning him about the kiss, his denials seem to double as attempts to make sure there’s no proof. “Did you see it? Did you see it? Who saw it?” he asks. He denies the kiss as “fake news” and questions where the “video evidence” is. He also calls the smooch a “deepfake” in a confessional, which feels like something you would only say if you thought it was possible footage existed.
Harry starts suggesting that Melinda made the kiss up for additional screen time and clout. (His friends, Dom and Stevan, both later corroborate Harry’s version to Jessica despite having no proof of Melinda’s intentions.) After the mixer, a drunk Harry tells Jess he is upset with himself because he was being “such a tool.” He vaguely mentions that Melinda tried to “set [him] up,” but that everyone there could see that there was “nothing going on” other than him carrying her to the bathroom.
After leaving his room, Harry reiterates to a table of girls later that night that “nothing happened” and Melinda wanted her “15 minutes.” However, after Brittan says she saw Melinda’s makeup on Harry’s face (which Harry says is a detail Melinda made up), his story evolves — he tells Dom that Melinda tried to kiss him on the cheek, but he turned away. Hmm, somehow this allegedly unwanted physical advance didn’t come up in the two conversations where Jessica pressed him for details on what happened? At one point, he admitted to telling Melinda that it would “look good if [she] were pregnant,” which Jessica was not happy about. Wouldn’t rejecting a kiss be something he’d want to share, if only to try to take the heat off himself?
Melinda’s Testimony
Melinda tells Xanthi at the mixer that Harry kissed her, adding, “I don’t lie, girl.” We see her laughing when Harry tells her one-on-one that she made the kiss up, but her expression hardens after she learns that he’s telling the group she’s lying. “Typical guys,” she says. (She later claimed in a TikTok livestream that Harry asked the boys at the mixer to say that they didn’t see anything.)
Back at the house, Melinda recalls to the girls that Harry carried her to the bathroom due to the rocks, but she didn’t make eye contact because it was “awkward.” She claims that Harry then kissed her and adds a few details — that he kissed her again and that she ended up kissing him back. In total, she seems to be claiming that he actually kissed her two or three times. Melinda also asks Brittan, who was sitting in the cabana during the mixer, what was on Harry’s nose. “Your makeup,” Brittan replies. The group conversation devolved into a short-lived spat between Jess and Melinda before cooler heads prevailed and they decided to have a private conversation. Later, Melinda told Jess more upsetting details.
The Cover-up (The Mixer, Part Two)
During the mini-reunion in the final episode, Harry admits that he made “silly” decisions and “embarrassed” himself. However, he does not directly acknowledge or apologize for lying on Melinda’s name. Netflix then drops audio evidence from the day of the mixer. First, we get proof that he lied to Jessica about that pregnancy conversation not being sexually suggestive. Then, we hear Melinda tell Harry that they’re not on-camera and no one is looking. Melinda also brings up their “treacherous kiss” and says she wants to “dog [his] face out.” In contrast to the denials he’s consistently given on-camera, Harry replies, “Oh, yeah, I want to fuck you.”
While there isn’t any footage of the kiss, there’s damning video evidence from afterward. We see Harry telling Chris that he “did something really bad” that he can’t talk about on-camera. He also goes up to the camera crew and asks point blank if they got any footage of him and Melinda kissing. “I didn’t mean to do it,” he says.
The Spin Zone
Ahead of the finale, in an episode of his Boyfriend Material podcast, Harry sheepishly described his actions on Perfect Match as those of a “gaslighting king,” joking that the U.S. Army would probably hit him up for gas for their tanks and helicopters. However, he still seemed to be trying to find ways to explain his behavior. Ahead of the finale, Harry suggested on Instagram that he was blackout drunk on the day of the mixer. On his podcast, he claimed that the men finished an entire bottle of vodka in the van before even getting to the mixer, where there were obviously more drinks available. He also claimed on his podcast that production reminded the cast members at the boys’ mixer there needed to be drama in this show they were paid to be part of and that the crew told him something along the lines of “Harry, you need to do something crazy.”
Case Closed
Verdict: Obviously, Harry lied about the kiss. Anyone considering going on a date with him should be required to watch a supercut of this season for their own safety first.
As for Melinda … sure, maybe she made it seem like the kiss was a little more unexpected than it really was. But who can blame her for wanting to downplay her eagerness to kiss a guy who threw her under the bus and called her a clout-chasing liar? By letting Harry think that the truth might never be revealed, Netflix really tested his character. How far would he go to protect himself? A kiss could be explained away as a temporary error in judgment, so the show gave him the opportunity to make more mistakes.
Jessica told Harry that she “look[ed] like a whole-ass fool” defending him, and she did. Despite the gaslighting, she still liked him enough to give him another chance after the finale. Perhaps if he had owned up to kissing Melinda from the get-go, Jess would have forgiven him and it would have made for a stronger real-world relationship … or at least one that lasted longer than a week.
Meanwhile, if the camera crew was trying to encourage or manipulate Harry into doing something dramatic, it’s odd that they didn’t get any footage. And if Harry kissed Melinda out of a desire to help Netflix make entertaining TV, why did he sound so apologetic while approaching the crew? Ultimately, all signs point to the fact that Harry not only kissed Melinda off-camera but was also more than happy to intentionally sacrifice her reputation in order to save his own. If the crew had told Harry that the moment was caught on audio and that they were filming his inadvertent confession, he would have had no choice but to come clean and we would not have seen all this gaslighting.
Our final verdict? None of the onscreen couples lasted, but Netflix and its producers turned out to be this season’s true perfect match.
