Love is blind – but only until it’s not

The new reality show highlights that we’re so focused on finding the one person who completes us, the one person we like to be with 24/7, and yet it has to be as convenient and easy to find as a pot noodle

If you’re ready to sink your teeth into another addictive dating show, then give Netflix’s Love Is Blind a try.

The show follows a group of men and women who converse with one another in isolated pods, an opaque screen between them. In just a few minutes, they make everlasting bonds and develop the deepest of feelings with a stranger they can’t even see. Mere days after, the L word has been dropped and men are also dropping on one knee. Your mind may know these couples can’t work, but your heart wants them to.

It does beg the question, what is it that we find so compelling about these “reality” dating shows? From Love Island to Married at First Sight, there has been an influx of programmes which are based on the idea that throwing a group of random people together, under various inventive circumstances, will become a magic recipe for happy endings. The romantic compatibility of these couples is left to the minds of producers and “scientists” who have decided what the formula is for creating a couple that has the chance of living happily ever after.

Love Is Blind contends that, if you remove the factor of physical attraction, you will end up focusing on conversation, the things you have in common, the personality of the other person, and so will of course fall in love for the right reasons.

Take Mark, for example. He reiterates over and over again that in the past his relationships had been based mainly on his attraction to a woman’s beauty. He places his hope for his relationship with Jessica in the fact that they connected through conversation in the pods. He ignores the lack of physical chemistry they demonstrated on vacation compared to the other couples, and he brushes off Jessica’s clear affection for another man called Barnett.

If you ask me, the game is already rigged. The contestants are pretty attractive by societal norms (a bit like in Love Island) and there isn’t enough diversity to ensure contestants meet other people from different walks of life.

These dating shows nonetheless catch us in their quixotic web and justify the fast pace of the couples’ intimacy by emphasising that these people are together 24/7. As nice as it would be to believe that the couples are given the optimum environment to flourish, I think they’re just another example of how warped dating culture has become. We are focused on getting the perfect relationship, the one person who completes us, the one person we like to be with 24/7, and yet it has to be as convenient and easy to find as a pot noodle.

The most interesting quality about Love Is Blind is that, just like singing competition show The Voice, it removes the ability for people to make a quick decision based on visuals. In a world of dating apps, people aren’t meeting in natural settings anymore, and physical attraction has become the most important quality in a potential partner.

Yet the stats show millennials are having less sex and marriage rates are falling: we are generally not forming the long-term romantic relationships that the Love Is Blind participants are yearning for. You cannot blame them for wanting to try a different method, even with as wild a premise as the show provides.

As the show develops, it’s not only the impact of physicality but also the societal differences between couples that come into play.

Employment, social media, age and race are not qualities that one can ignore in a partner and it may be considered naïve and overly optimistic to think that they can. I can’t help but feel uncomfortable at Mark’s over-optimistic approach to the ten-year age gap, and Barnett’s unmentioned discomfort at Amber’s lack of employment.

When it comes to these unseeing couples, only time will tell how many of them will work out. But really, it’s less the romance and more the apprehension of waiting for things to blow up that keeps viewers of Love Is Blind at the edge of their seats.

If you ask me, the premise of meeting people changes drastically over time but the fundamentals of a relationship do not. As soon as you see the red flags, it’s best not to ignore them.