In a time where everyone seems to be binge-watching, Netflix has taken the crown for the most popular reality TV shows to consume quickly in one sitting. Netflix’s Love is Blind has been all the rage recently, generating more talk than The Bachelor or Keeping up With the Kardashians.
The premise of the show is a social experiment where single men and women look for love and essentially get engaged prior to ever meeting in person. The show looks to dismantle preconceived notions and feelings about looks and introduce people as romantic prospects based on personality alone.
The setting? A blind-dating facility where the men live together on one side of the building and the women in the other. Their main point of contact is through “pods”, which are rooms filled with sofas separated by a glass wall that cannot be seen through.
Over the course of 10 days, participants date each other within the pods and are never permitted face to face contact. The show seeks to wonder— can love be blind? In seeing if one could choose to marry someone without ever seeing them in person, the show looks to answer that question.
The conversations broadcasted between participants are rather deep, and participants spend time taking notes in notebooks about the other people they talk to. They do all this knowing that within 40 or so days, they will hope to reach the goal of the show, which is to marry one of the people they have been dating, without ever seeing them.
The lure, perhaps, is the drama of those who have gotten engaged meeting one another in person for the first time just before going on a honeymoon to Mexico and then returning to plan their weddings and introduce one another to their families. From there, the weddings are broadcasted where we as an audience have no idea whether the couples will actually go through with the wedding.
Though wildly engaging and entertaining by combining elements of The Bachelor, Big Brother, and even Love Island, the show finds a scarce amount of couples actually make it, and makes use of a variety of coping mechanisms for participants to feel comfortable.
One of them? Alcohol. As emotions run high, participants continuously get drunk on the screen, perhaps to withstand the pressure of finding someone to marry through the plush pods, without ever seeing them and finding a genuine connection.
The program can be isolating, which has been coined as rather ironic during the current state of social-distancing. With throngs of people wondering how casual dating will be possible during a time of the COVID-19 global pandemic, Love is Blind seems to provide some of the answers.
There is no dating program or reality show more set on social distancing, with participants not allowed any kind of physical touch. Not only that, but intimately and amiably, the participants are well over six feet away, often, with a large wall between them.
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