‘Love Is Blind’ Is Blinding (And Addictive)

A ’90s boy band star. A streaming service. LED-lighted personal pods. A deep well of underlying sadness. What do all of these things have in common? “Love Is Blind,” an addictive and slightly dystopian reality show on Netflix. 

The series, which is running as a three-week event, with the finale dropping on Feb. 27, is framed as a marriage-focused social experiment. A group of men and a group of women are placed in a living facility, kept in separate quarters and left to speed date over the course of 10 days. They sit in those living room pods in which they can hear each other and speak for hours but not see each other. The ones who make matches get engaged, sight unseen, and finally meet each other face to face. The engaged couples then get shipped off to a romantic vacation in Mexico and then back to Atlanta, where they move in, meet the parents and (ostensibly!) walk down the aisle into a legal marriage just four weeks after meeting. 

Hosted ― and we use this word lightly because they appear maybe five times in the first nine episodes ― by Nick Lachey (the former lead singer in 98 Degrees) and his wife, Vanessa, “Love Is Blind” is framed as almost radical, a way to shake up the swipe-heavy, transactional world of dating apps in favor of something more real and true. “Everyone wants to be loved for who they are, not for their looks, their race, their background or their income,” says Vanessa to all of the contestants toward the beginning of the show. 

But whether “Love Is Blind” is actually successful at achieving what it purportedly sets out to is… questionable at best. HuffPost reporters Emma Gray and Leigh Blickley discuss.

“Love Is Blind” is highly addictive and highly troubling. Enter the pod with caution. 

LB: My take on this is if you’re going the whole “love is blind” route, cast people who aren’t conventionally attractive? Each one of the contestants is good looking, and that frustrated me. We also needed more diversity ― body type, race, age. (We saw that with “The Circle,” and it was great!) I wanted to see people fall in love with someone they never would’ve chosen in real life due to societal standards. That’s not to say you want people to “regret” who they propose to; it’s to say that if the whole goal of this experiment is to test the idea of physical versus emotional attraction, then we want to see how deep that concept can go. I needed more of a range of couples to truly appreciate and understand what the show claims it wants to say about love.

EG: Here’s the thing, Leigh: Love isn’t blind. (Also, the meaning of “love is blind,” as written by Shakespeare, is not that love has nothing to do with looks, it’s that love makes you blind to someone’s faults. But I digress.) There is a certain appeal to setting up a dating show, in the long tradition of “The Dating Game,” that forces people to step back and consider someone’s personality and tone and history and ability to hold a conversation outside of the immediate snap judgments that our brains inevitably make when we see someone’s face (or a photo of someone’s face). It’s important to question our ingrained ideas about beauty, desire and attractiveness, and the ways that race and class and sexuality play into that. However, as you stated, “Love Is Blind” doesn’t quite do this, especially because every one of the contestants fits into the mold of conventional attractiveness (thin, gender-conforming, etc.). I also think that it obscures the very real role that physical attraction plays in long-term relationships ― at least at the beginning. You can love someone, love talking to them, and find them fascinating and sensitive and wonderful. But if you don’t want to be physically intimate, that person might just be your friend. I resent the way that “Love Is Blind” treats an inability to bridge that gap as a moral failing on the part of the two women who struggle with it. 

LB: Right. Both Jessica and Kelly struggle to be intimate with their partners due to their self-professed “types.” Jessica ― a pretty, blond, 34-year-old tech associate ― just can’t get over the fact that her fiancé, Mark ― a 24-year-old personal trainer of Mexican descent ― is 10 years younger. She also doesn’t like that he’s shorter than most of the men she’s dated. And health coach Kelly, who initially seems head over heels in love with architectural lighting consultant Kenny, doesn’t want to sleep with him until they know for sure that this. is. it. (I, personally, respect her choice, as this experiment is obviously very complicated.) But later on in the season, Kelly admits in her confessional that Kenny doesn’t physically match up with the type of man she goes after ― she likes darker-haired guys ― and she’s struggling to get past that. Maybe they’re just “best friends,” she contemplates.

As you mentioned, though, the phrase “love is blind” is about a whole lot more than looks. “Love is blinding” is the more accurate way to think about it. So what the show fails to present is the truth: You want to emotionally connect with someone and also, hopefully, have sex with them. It’s not about one thing or the other. You need both to sustain a relationship, at least in my mind. You can’t force a romance, or marriage in this case, just because one of those connections is there.

But Emma, how do you feel about the way the show is formatted? Do you think more pod time was necessary to truly showcase these relationships?

LB: Cue 98 Degrees’ “I Do (Cherish You).” 

If you like “Love Island,” “Temptation Island,” “90 Day Fiancé,” “Married at First Sight,” “The Bachelor,” etc., etc., etc., what are you waiting for? But time is money. Invest cautiously.

EG: If you’re into dating shows that are gripping but run the risk of leaving you feeling a little empty and icky inside, go for it. (I am one of those people!) Otherwise, maybe skip.

“Love Is Blind” is now streaming on Netflix.