By Rachele Preto
This piece first appeared as a featured article in volume 95, issue three of Pelican. You can view our print archive here.
Love is Blind is a show that fascinates me. For starters, its premise is the very opposite of most reality dating shows, like Love Island, in which participants, who are usually conventionally fit and attractive, see each other half-naked almost immediately. When the emphasis on most dating shows is physical attraction between participants, Love is Blind poses an interesting ‘antidote’ to the sex-focused dating shows we are used to seeing.
At the same time, the show takes its philosophy to the extreme. Participants are not allowed to see each other until after they get engaged. Once engaged, they reveal themselves to one another and then begin living together for a few weeks. If they make it to the end without clawing each other’s eyes out, they get married.
The kind of participants the show attracts are usually in their thirties, which seems to be the stage in life that most people begin anxiously trying to ‘settle down’. Some are single parents, and many have accomplished careers, but all of them share one thing in common: a distaste for the modern dating scene. Many of them have had trouble finding people who would ‘truly love them for them’ and share goals for marriage and children.
The presumption is that the issue with dating today is an over-emphasis on physical appearances rather than the person inside, and by removing physical appearances altogether, the superficiality that plagues the modern dating scene can be eliminated and true love may be found. When participants are interviewed at the show’s beginning, many are reeling with excitement at the prospect of being married in just a few weeks–undoubtedly never having imagined that this would be the way they would meet ‘the one’.
It fascinated me–the faith of participants in the show’s unrealistic precedent, and at their cores, a blind faith (pun intended) in the ideal of true love. In my view, the idea of ‘the one’–a perfect person, who loves and accepts you unconditionally, who will continue loving you through thick and thin until death do you part, is a hell of a thing to believe in. Supposedly, the reason why this idea is so firmly entrenched in the hearts of the participants is because sometimes Love is Blind delivers on its promises. Season six did manage to produce one happily married couple, Johnny and Amy. However, what is bizarre is that one success story becomes proof of the ‘attainability’ of true love for everyone.
There is no doubt that this ideal can become true. For instance, just because the snowy leopard is incredibly rare, it doesn’t mean it isn’t out there. If you do decide to climb three- to four-thousand feet of mountain in Central Asia, then maybe you would find one, but you would still have to be incredibly lucky.
The emphasis on luck epitomised in the fictional ‘meet-cutes’ we all gush over, is the idea that we must leave it up to the universe. The enigmatic workings of the universe must be allowed to run its course, and we should adopt a somewhat counter-intuitive passive approach to finding love. “You can’t hurry love / No you just have to wait” sing The Supremes whilst Sleeping Beauty slumbers in a tower waiting for the kiss of a prince. The passive pursuit of romantic love, especially for women, is still seen in modern culture, through the popular practice of ‘manifestation’ (‘How to manifest your husband in four steps’, is one that comes to mind.)
Chance is indeed a crucial element in all relationships. The universe is incredibly random, and meeting people can simply be a matter of complete coincidence. However, it feels farcical to argue that finding ‘the one’ hinges on sheer luck. Still, this is the excitement of watching a show like Love is Blind, the possibility that we can witness a one-in-a-million event, the chance formation of a perfect match. It is also the excitement of those participating – the tantalising idea that their dream spouse could be waiting for them on the other side of the screen.
However, this dream vision begins to unravel pretty fast. For instance, many participants started realising that perhaps there is more than one good choice. We watch Jimmy put himself through agony trying to decide whether he should pick Chelsea or Jessica. Because of this expectation of an exclusive monogamous partnership, Jimmy had to choose just one woman and completely cut off his relationship with the other. Another couple, Clay and AD, faced obstacles when it became clear that Clay had a lot of unresolved family issues that needed addressing before he felt comfortable marrying. Interestingly, Clay only became aware of his un-readiness for marriage through his relationship with AD. Clay could not have felt unprepared for marriage at the start of the show, if not why would he have entered?
When I think of what happened, I am reminded of this idea of being the ‘natural fit’ of one’s partner. This harks back to the Greek myth, that in the beginning, all humans had four arms, four legs and two faces until Zeus split them into two halves, condemning them to spend their lives trying to search for their other half. Like two puzzle pieces, you are meant to come together in this perfect union, in which every part of you joins perfectly with every part of them. The connotations of ‘ease’ in this image, minimise the importance of personal change and adaptability to one’s partner’s needs.
In the case of Clay and AD, it was clear that Clay needed to change and grow as a person, and it certainly was not the job of AD to fill in those inadequacies. Yet, Clay had not anticipated this need to change, likely because of this idea that we should be natural fits for one another with no work involved. On the flip side, AD was willing to marry Clay despite his glaring issues and become the suffering wife, a martyr for the ideal of true love. This too was problematic; yet the lengths that AD was willing to go to for the sake of love is unsurprising given women are typically the ones to put in greater emotional labour, and sacrifice their own needs.
Watching the sixth season of Love is Blind, you cannot help but notice a fundamental conflict between the ideals of love and the realities of the relationships that form. It becomes clear that the goal of a happy, monogamous marriage is highly unattainable, and after watching the trainwreck-of-a-reunion, you can be forgiven for feeling a sense of pessimism at the state of the (hetero, cis) dating scene.
The show positions itself as an ‘antidote’ to highly superficial modern dating culture; the ubiquity of dating apps, an overemphasis on appearances, and the prevalence of ghosting and flakiness. Yet, it perpetuates acutely lofty ideals of romantic love that ironically make it equally impossible for participants to find partners. Love is Blind encourages an obsessive pursuit for perfection in relationships, rather than human-to-human interaction which necessitates far more friction and compromise than many of us are comfortable doing.
If you got to the end of this thousand-word rumination on the show Love is Blind, my hat goes off to you. There is much to critique about the modern ideal of romantic love, its narrowness, unattainability, and toxicity. Not only are the lofty ideals of romantic love harmful to those pursuing romantic relationships, but those who fall outside this group. The amatonormativity of Love is Blind and our culture at large means people who prefer to be single are viewed as miserable and incomplete. People in open and polyamorous relationships are also negatively stereotyped as disloyal, or incapable of ‘loving fully’. With all this in mind, rom-coms and dating shows may be incredibly fun to watch, but their typically normative representations of romantic love stand in need of re-evaluation.
To conclude, love may or may not be blind, but it certainly is complicated and confusing. Navigating the intricate games of romantic relationships is certainly not for the faint-hearted, and I for one, shall be watching comfortably from my sofa, when the next season comes out.