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 27 February, 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 favour 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.
The Bottom Line
Love Is Blind is highly addictive and highly troubling. Enter the pod with caution.
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