Jacob Francy, 26 and Allie Bernstein,27
Love Is Blind is a dating reality show where single men and women try to find a match and fall in love without ever seeing each other face-to-face. They date, get engaged in pods, and meet each other for the first time after promising to spend the rest of their lives together. After a couple of weeks of living together in the real world, they must come to a final decision at the altar. Is love blind, or will superficial factors tear a couple’s love apart? Jacob Francy and Allie Bernstein have different takes on the concept of this reality show.
Allie’s Take:
Love is Blind is one of the only reality television shows where the contestants are forced to be genuine; their happiness is on the line. If you have around 10 days to become engaged, 3 weeks to live with your future spouse, and a wedding in the 4th week, then time is of the essence. Everyone who comes to participate is there to find a genuine love connection, as their past relationships have failed due to superficial reasons. When one person connects with someone on such a deep and personal level in the pods, enough to want to propose, that couple will do whatever it takes to make the relationship work in the limited time they have. Love is Blind has had 10 marriages throughout the various seasons, and only 4 of those couples have decided to divorce. One amazing success is the love story between Lauren Speed & Cameron Hamilton, a married couple of 6 years who participated in the very first season. Celebrating their sixth anniversary, Lauren wrote, "Six years of love, laughter, and building a beautiful life together. Every day with you is a reminder that love truly is the best adventure."
While it may seem like everything is sunshine and rainbows for them, they definitely faced their fair share of challenges on the show. Lauren, a black woman, had never been in an interracial marriage before and was stressed about getting her father’s approval. Cameron had anxieties about getting married so soon. Nonetheless, they worked together to create an amazing life and marriage. This shows that while some couples may decide to end the engagement or eventually get divorced, there is a very possible opportunity for contestants to meet their soulmates. Outside of the chance to find love, the Love is Blind experience creates an amazing chance for contestants to learn emotional vulnerability and be pushed outside of their comfort zones. Additionally, the contestants become advanced communicators as that is their only chance to find love in the pods. When you have to only focus on your goals and values, and how you might share that with the person you are dating, you will also learn a lot about yourself and what you want in life. Madison from Season 8 said, "The experiment taught me valuable lessons about self-love and understanding” despite leaving the pods with no fiance. Ultimately, this unique reality television show has proven and continues to show the world that a couple can thrive solely on an emotional connection, despite not knowing what their partner looks like.
Jacob’s Take:
The show Love Is Blind on Netflix is built on a ridiculous idea: love can and should develop without physical attraction after just a few weeks of faceless conversations. The thought behind the series is that contestants “fall in love” without ever seeing each other and only meet in person after getting engaged. While this might sound like a romantic social experiment, it ignores basic human biology and psychology, making the entire concept more faith-based than fact-based. Almost all of us can admit physical attraction plays a massive role in romantic relationships. While personality, personal values, and emotional connection are of course crucial to making a relationship work, even scientific studies show that physical attraction is still one of the strongest factors in romantic bonding today. A 2017 study published in Psychological Science found that “physical attraction significantly predicted long-term relationship satisfaction.” Simply put, couples who find each other physically attractive are more likely to have higher rates of happiness in their relationships. More research from The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships found that 86% of people consider physical attraction an “essential factor” in romantic relationships, meaning the show’s idea is unhealthily forcing the majority of people on the show to ignore a personal requirement for relationships. Love Is Blind is putting too much hope in humanity, attempting to make us believe that attraction is irrelevant when it’s really an instinct that has historically been a part of human nature for the estimated 190,000 years we have called Earth home.
Also worth noting, the majority of couples from the show end up separating, and many have cited attraction issues as the reason. Even if contestants could develop real emotional connections in the show’s infamous “pods,” the idea that they should then marry a stranger they’ve known for mere weeks is absurd. According to a 2015 study from Emory University, couples who “date for at least two years before getting engaged are 20% less likely to divorce” than those who marry before the 2-year mark. It goes without saying that the longer a couple has been together, the more likely they will live happily together and the longer their legal marriage will last.
Love Is Blind is forcing contestants to propose within days and get married within weeks. This concept completely ignores what humans know about successful relationships. Even if the contestants had seen each other from the start, this would still be a terrible way to form a lasting marriage with hopes to begin a family later on. Relationships require time to grow, and marriages based on short-term passion will almost always fail. In summary, Love Is Blind is a nonsense show that ignores basic human nature. Physical attraction is a key component of love, and rushing into marriage with someone you’ve only spoken to for a few weeks is a recipe for disaster whether you’ve seen them or not. The show may be entertaining, but this is not a recipe for love. It’s a joke.