“Love Is Blind” isn’t just an experiment — it’s a compelling shortcut
Nobody really knows quite "how" to date. "Love Is Blind" embraces this, offering a fast-pass to marriage.
Hello! I haven’t posted here since 2022, which is wild, because it is famously now multiple months into the year 2023.
I haven’t been inspired to write here, though I’ve been writing elsewhere (mostly my Notes app). Really, though, I’ve been thinking and growing within the walls of my own home, and in the privacy of my best friends’ iMessage chats and happy hours and couches.1
So I guess I can say that the vibes are good.
But a lot has been going on and I cannot stay silent any longer. Sofia Richie married a Jewish music exec in the South of France. Boygenius performed at Coachella. I’m grateful that this video exists, but this celebrity couple shouldn’t.
And in the last 24 hours alone, Fox News broke up with Tucker Carlson; CNN dumped Don Lemon; Logan Roy …. sans kilt; I changed my sheets and meal-prepped some lunches for the week.
We’ve all been really busy.
But today we must focus on some belated considerations on everyone’s favorite show, the source of our newfound collective disdain for Vanessa Lachey.
My obsession with “Love Is Blind” began in February 2020, when Time colleagues and I would whisper about Jessica/Amber/Barnett in the kitchen so as not to spoil the show for others. In the years since, it has penetrated my psyche unlike any other reality show ever has.
Season 4 ended last Sunday with the worst non-live live production this world has ever seen. This means that I am in the final moments of being able to write about it before we stop caring.
If you’re here, it means I caught you in time.
In real life, there are no definitive rules for how to date.
But there are some best practices we hold onto for dear life, the conventions we’ve adopted from “Sex and the City” and “He’s Just Not That Into You,” not to mention the $4.3 billion dating app market and its cottage industries.
We try to get to know people slowly, but carefully; without seeming crazy, and without being too intense; but without withholding, and without having our guards up; but without having our guards down too soon. We try to make our intentions known, but carefully enough that our soulmates aren’t scared, and then a lot of the time you get the ick and are fucked regardless2.
On “Love Is Blind,” dates begin with marriage as an agreed-upon desired outcome. You arrive at your first date in the pods with the understanding that, if this goes well, you are going to choose each other.
Cast members often remark on the lack of “outside-world distractions.” While this is true to the experience, perhaps a better framing is in the removal of all emotional boundaries and social norms that exist in the outside world.
The “blindness” of it all is therefore oversold in the premise. The more compelling element is the chance at a golden ticket, a fast-pass to marriage.
There is no real arbiter for the level of vulnerability one should show at which point in a new relationship. We all have unique boundaries and expectations for sharing, and these self-imposed rules sometimes change from date to date (and from cocktail to cocktail).
But we are desperate to understand which parts of ourselves are safe to show to potential new partners, what should stay hidden and until which point.
There are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of SEO-targeted articles and Reddit threads and WikiHow pages attempting to elucidate this confusion.
Why The Third Date Matters And What You Should Know By The End Of It
When Should You Talk About Exes on Dates?
Talking About Your Exes on a Date Is Actually a Good Idea
How to Tell a Guy You Miss Him Without Looking Pathetic.
I will anecdotally allege that the universal confusion over how to act and how not to act — of how to protect yourself while attracting someone new, giving them enough to know you but not too much — is perhaps the worst element of modern dating.
The fact of the matter is, nobody knows exactly what to do.
But the irony is that we all think we do.
One friend will tell you that you shouldn’t ask someone to be exclusive because it’s too soon, and then 10 minutes later, your other friend will tell you to call this person and ask how they feel about you. (Err, by the way, don’t listen to the second friend, they’re wrong.)
The podcast and Instagram/TikTok creator We Met At Acme is one of many who boast controversial rules, purporting to offer singles a map for dating. Any such map is inherently flawed, as its existence suggests that a departure from these rules dooms a relationship.
But relationships are not math quizzes, and if they were, they’d be much easier. We’d have the answers.
For every horror story of the girl who slept with the guy too soon and the guy who introduced his parents to someone after four dates is a “Today Show” segment about the people who loved each other for 75 years after a whirlwind weekend romance. And then there are the happily married couples who met with a dance floor make-out and never looked back.
And so these “rules” we purport to follow are arbitrary, inconclusive, unclear, and unhelpful.
In a way, “Love Is Blind” not only admits this, but embraces it, subverting the guidance we've come to rely on. In the pods, single people are permitted to unclench. They can unleash their deepest truths3 and insecurities on virtual strangers without fear of embarrassment or worrying they said too much.
The name of the game is vulnerability, extreme honesty — something seemingly impossible with new potential partners in the regular dating world.
I thought about this more than ever throughout the fourth season.
What if the antidote to our dating complexities is raw honesty and openness? What if embracing our truths and our darknesses upfront could bring us deeper connections? What if our rules are wrong?
Mandy Len Catron posed similar questions in her 2015 Modern Love column, “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This,” reflecting on her experience answering psychologist Arthur Aron’s “36 questions that lead to love” with a potential partner. In a 1997 study, Aron tested whether those 36 questions, which become deeper and more personal as they go on, could make two heterosexual people fall in love.
Catron ended up falling in love with her partner from the exercise, too:
It’s true you can’t choose who loves you, although I’ve spent years hoping otherwise, and you can’t create romantic feelings based on convenience alone. Science tells us biology matters; our pheromones and hormones do a lot of work behind the scenes.
But despite all this, I’ve begun to think love is a more pliable thing than we make it out to be. Arthur Aron’s study taught me that it’s possible — simple, even — to generate trust and intimacy, the feelings love needs to thrive.
This is essentially the ethos of “Love Is Blind,” that given the right opportunity to open themselves to others, people can fall in love that fast.
While the show is not remotely in the business of intellectual curiosity, implicit is the suggestion that modern dating norms have moved too far away from this space of quick intimacy.
But it’s not an easy sell.
Psychologists have long discouraged people from moving too fast in new relationships. The great Amanda Mull criticized the show for this in The Atlantic last year.
“One of the most jarring things about the show is how quickly and completely some participants’ boundaries disappear,” she wrote. (Mull also described the show as “like a television producer read a Wikipedia description of the Stanford prison experiment and decided that all it needed was a little romance.”)
My friend Sam once taught me about the concept of intensity vs. intimacy — the idea that intensity can easily exist without real intimacy, but we often mistake the former for the latter4.
Being intensely connected early on does not always come with a real, deep bond, which quickly becomes toxic and is harmful to our emotional health. (If you have fallen for an emotionally unavailable person, you are likely nodding your head right now.)
In these scenarios, we feel wanted, and we want, but neither partner is safe. We are in the shallow, wading unknowingly towards a steep drop to the deep end.
In my own dating life, I think I generally fall somewhere on the middle of the spectrum. I am probably naturally more inclined towards sharing with others than most — hi — and that’s just a part of my personality I cannot remove for the sake of a 20-something finance guy who wants to grab drinks in Murray Hill (hi).
Still, there are things I won’t say, things that are private and special and undeserving of being known by those who don’t deserve me yet. I don’t want to endanger my heart, entrusting in someone who hasn’t earned my trust. And so I, like everyone else, am careful. I try to follow what feels right, and ignore the rules that don’t.
But maybe we should all be a little more open — a bit less fearful of the hurt, and more brave on the path towards love.
Maybe not, though.
Nobody knows anything anyway.
And also with a therapist, a very chic and wise older woman whose sessions will be covered by Aetna after I hit my deductible. #Slay!
There are some interesting theories about “getting the ick,” though. “At the root of it, very often, getting the ick is a defense mechanism,” this Shape article put it. A feeling shouldn’t be ignored — but, it should be understood.
I will caveat this with the following gripe: Some “Love Is Blind” contestants talk like they have never been on more than 3 dates with the same Hinge person. I am sick and tired of hearing 20-somethings say they’ve never felt so vulnerable with anyone before, after telling someone about how their parents’ divorce impacted them or how they had bad acne. Grow up!
I kind of touched on this in a post reflecting on a whirlwind romance with a Tinder match in Paris years later.