Love is Blind Needs a New Formula

Here's how I'd reimagine the show.

I was fully uninterested in watching the latest season of Love is Blind but once again, I got sucked in. I’ve been in chronic pain the past couple of weeks and wanted to watch something formulaic that didn’t require intense focus, which is exactly what Love is Blind delivers every time. While I could easily sit up here and dish out opinions about the choices and behaviors of the cast members, it’s apparent that through 6 seasons of the show, there is nothing particularly unique about the drama of its participants. Every season features a cast of people who are emotionally ravenous, self-absorbed, insecure, vain, or delusional. Every once in a while there is an emotionally grounded couple (Brett and Tiffany from S4 are GOATED) in a sea of glaringly incompatible pairings. The series generally incites discourse around petty arguments, audacious statements, flagrant behavior, and red flags. The conflicts between these couples become more pronounced once they have met face to face, and that is the intention.

Love is Blind is designed for couples to fail. The circumstances of the pods create confusion and insecurities that are often difficult to separate from the participant’s unaddressed emotional baggage that preceded their experience on the show. People who have never opened up emotionally or done the shadow work required to have this discernment, “fall in love” by sitting on a couch and talking through a wall for a number of weeks, and many of them could probably just benefit from talk therapy. By no means do people have to be fully self-actualized and healed from all of their emotional issues to be worthy of love (I certainly was not when I met my partner). However, there is a base level of self-awareness required to have the emotional intelligence to work through conflict and recognize when/if someone is actually “your person” or if you’re just so deeply in need of love, that you’ve willed them into being that. This same level of awareness is required to check your biases and traumas that influence how you perceive others. I don’t think most people ask themselves why they have preferences that have little to do with true comptability and deep connection, and the pods do little to challenge the cast to do this work.

Many people walk into this show with the mindset that their spouse is in the pods and that they will leave engaged by any means— and there is something romantic about that kind of blind optimism. But, in deciding that you gon’ leave here with something, you’re setting yourself up to accept and overlook issues that could be a deal breaker, in hopes that “fighting for love” in real life will be enough to overcome this. Added to this complexity is the time crunch of only having a few weeks to decide if you will get engaged and eventually marry someone. This leaves many of the contestants professing their love prematurely, which lays down a shakey foundation to build the trust and security required to enter a commitment of that magnitude. Three weeks of pillow pod talk and trauma dumping may be enough to form an emotional connection, but it’s not enough to sustain a serious committed relationship. Not to mention, talking to each other through the wall limits the expression of that connection to one primary love language: words of affirmation aka a naricisst’s specialty (speaking from experience here!). These people think they are falling in love with each other (and some of them genuinely do), but what they’re initially falling for is the idea of one another. People can tell you who they are but you don’t actually know them until you’ve bared witness to their behavior. This is what leaves so many cast members deeply confused and struggling to connect the voice they heard through the wall to the person they’ve rushed into an engagement and cohabitation with. But, they’ve backed themselves into a corner because they’ve made promises, and spoken in absolutes (“I will always love/fight for you”) and are now forcing themselves to fit a square peg into a round hole. It makes me wonder if the producers want people to actually find love or if they just want to put them through emotional torment for our entertainment.

Below are a few suggestions for how this show could actually work in the participants’ favor that Netflix better pay me for if they ever use.

DO A BETTER JOB AT CASTING

This has been a common complaint due to the amount of contestants who are fixated on looks (aka losing the plot), live double lives, and are in deep need of psychological care. Apparently, participants are required to do a psychiatric evaluation but clearly, it is not extensive enough. Yes, it’s important to know if a potential mate has a deep psychological issue that could cause you harm but once we’ve determined people aren’t potential serial killers, let’s do a little more digging, I know the bar is hell but damn. Are we checking on emotional intelligence? Do we know love languages? What is their attachment style? What are their relationship patterns? Are these people introspective? What are their gender, cultural, or racial biases? These are base level requirements for people looking to find love with someone they’ve never seen. If we can’t go off of physical attraction, we can least make sure there’s a higher probability of deep emotional connection by selecting people who are at minimum trying to be emotionally connected to themselves first.

GUIDED QUESTIONS

One of the trickiest things about dating both on reality shows and in real life is learning how to ask open-ended questions that challenge someone to self-reflect and answer thoughtfully. I know that we don’t see everything that the participants talk about but there seems to be a fixation with surface-level ideals that don’t actually say much about your level of compatibility. It may seem like talking about how many kids you want, where you want to live, your hobbies, and what kind of dates you’d like to go on would lead you to determine if someone is the right fit. This is even more true for people who have limited experience dating people who actually like them (which seems to be a lot of people on this show). If Netflix partnered with We’re Not Really Strangers or The Skin Deep, to help add in some guided questions that participants haven’t considered asking themselves, let alone a potential spouse, we might actually get somewhere.

LOWER THE STAKES A LITTLE BIT

Instead of forcing people to get engaged in order to see each other, they could restructure the show into a series of steps:

1. Connection - Establishing a connection is just the first step, so can we put off the commitment aspect until the connection is explored a bit more? Instead of proposing, participants can ask the person they want to leave the pods with if they’d be willing to take the next step. If they say yes, they meet each other, have a cute lil kissy kiss and then go on a romantic getaway. Those cringe ass proposals aren’t doing nothing for nobody — even if they do get married, don’t these couples deserve to have a proposal story that is more unique to their relationship?

2. Attraction - The couples getaway seems to be where couples find out if their attraction is more than mental and emotional. I understand the premise of the show, but physical attraction and chemistry is still important to most people, even if it’s not the most important. Through this vacation, they get to see their chemistry or lack thereof in real life. At the end of the vacation, the couple can decide if they want to take the next step, again. If they say yes, they fly home together, if not, they go their separate ways. Since the vacation seems to be where couples start to unravel (I will never forget Carlton and Diamond’s chaotic break up, she really sang “Don’t Hurt Yourself” to that man), it just makes sense that they work this decision into the format of the show.

3. Cohabitation - After the couple returns home, they go to their respective apartments, check out how each other lives to get an idea of what they might be signing up for, and then pack their things to go cohabitate in a production apartment that belongs to neither person. This cohabitation period is another opportunity for couples to make a mindful decision to continue moving forward or break up. If they want to make the next step after this stage, this is when they would get engaged. This gives an opportunity for us to see thoughtful and intentional proposals. More swooning, less cringing, please!

4. Commitment - After choosing to get engaged, the final step would be saying I do or I don’t at the alter, which keeps the essence of the show’s premise but does so in a more organic way. It gives each person the autonomy to choose one another as opposed to being forced to stick it out for the sake of the experiment— especially considering many past cast members have alleged that production has forced them to stay in circumstances they did not want to. I also think coming to the table and continuing to choose each other step by step will help build the security, trust and confidence people need to go forward with marriage

INTENSIVE PRE-MARITAL COUNSELING

Since conflicts seem to be inevitable for couples whether they’ve had a contentious vacation, or they are getting acclimated to cohabitating with one another, an unbiased third party would be instrumental in helping them work through these issues. Marriages are hard and equipping people with some tools to prepare for the challenges ahead can help them walk into the commitment with a clear(er) head. The structure of this should not be a week-by-week session, as it would happen in real life. I think an intensive session with a trained professional to assess the journey of the relationship, and the problems that came up along the way would provide a good recap for the audience and a reminder for the couples of why they continued to choose each other each step of the way. Ideally, this would take place a week before the wedding, giving them seven days to make up their mind if they want to really take the leap or not.

GET RID OF NICK AND VANESSA FFS

As hosts of Love is Blind, Nick and Vanessa Lachey’s presence feels purely ornamental. They don’t seem to offer much insight or guidance other than to affirm the feelings and choices that the participants make (or be all up in people’s uterusus). It always feels like they come out of no where. You’re spending hours watching the show and as it transitions to a new stage, here come the Lacheys to tell us about the part of the journey we’re on, as if we don’t know. Replacing these cameos (if you can even call them that) with the next step decision making moments between the couples as mentioned above, would make the show feel more focused and intentional.

*BONUS: CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE

Okay, this is just something that seems like it would be fun but remember when they did that Black Mirror episode where it was an interactive choose-your-own adventure? I think that would be so cool for this show! If viewers could pick which cast members’ journey they wanted to follow, it would allow us to also be shocked during the big reveal. It helps the audience empathize with the emotional rollercoaster of the participants who have been talking to a wall for weeks, instead of just being flies on the wall.

Dating is already cumbersome and emotionally draining for singles who have struggled for years to find their person. For a show that is based on the premise of helping people find deeper connections, the team behind Love is Blind seem committed to doing anything but that. It’s not enough to ask people to see beyond exterior appearances, we have to challenge people to do the internal work that requires them to unpack why they overvalue that in the first place. If they want to actually challenge these norms, they should create an environment that opens people up for rich, sustaining and fortifying love. In a time where romantic prospects are few, and people are getting married less and less, giving viewers insight and hope would be so much more valuable than orchestrating the same failures season after season.

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With love,

LaChelle