After Netflix released Love is Blind’s third-season finale and reunion last Wednesday, viewers unpacked the most dramatic moments of the season on social media. One couple’s story stood out above the rest: that of ex-fiancés Zanab Jaffrey and Cole Barnett. Of the entire cast, Zanab was the only woman of color in a relationship with a white man. But Cole was repeatedly ignorant of how Zanab’s race and gender played a factor in her reactions to their relationship, as well as the relationship itself. In the end, Zanab rejected Cole at the altar—and following the show’s dramatic conclusion, viewers have become as ignorant as Cole, by making Zanab the villain.
Since the season ended, Zanab has gone from a fan-favorite cast member to being called psychotic, manipulative, and a liar. She’s been called melodramatic and insecure. She’s been compared to Amber Heard (who experienced a wave of terrifying harassment after a faction of the public accused her of lying about being abused by her ex-husband, Johnny Depp) and told she “destroyed” Cole by breaking up with him.
Cole and Zanab, seen during the Love Is Blind Season 3 reunion.
Sara Mally/NetflixBut rewatching the show itself, these accusations and criticisms don't hold water. Instead, it becomes obvious why Zanab, of everyone on the show, is an easy target for the viewers: She is a woman of color who spoke up for herself against her mistreatment by a white partner.
At the altar, following a season of tension between the couple, Zanab had strong words for Cole. “You have disrespected me, you have insulted me, you have critiqued me, and for what it’s worth, you have single-handedly shattered my self-confidence,” Zanab told Cole in front of their shocked wedding guests. “And the messed-up thing is I know I love you, but love shouldn’t feel this way. I can’t marry you.”
As Zanab walked away crying, a tearful and humiliated Cole told the camera, “Why has she never said that to my face? She chose now because she knew it would hurt more in front of all my friends and family… She had me fooled big time. I knew we were not perfect, but that? It’s one of the worst experiences of my life.”
But she had said it to his face before the wedding. Zanab never hid her feelings about how Cole made her feel, starting from when they first met each other in person. On their group honeymoon with the other couples, Zanab found out that Cole had told Colleen that Zanab wasn’t his physical type—but that Colleen was.
“Colleen is a knockout. [I] can’t look like her, [I] will never look like her,” Zanab said to Cole at a party before their wedding, reiterating a conversation they’d had weeks prior. She continued, saying he had “affected my self-esteem” and “I don’t want to be in a relationship like this.”
Cole’s comment about Colleen wasn't a one-off remark, either. Cole also told fellow castmate Alexa Alfia that Zanab wasn’t “the first girl I would pick out in a crowd and say she’s hot.” Cole even went so far as to respond to Zanab’s playful request that he “rate her,” based on her hotness by calling Zanab a “9 out of 10” and calling Colleen and fellow contestant Raven Ross perfect 10s.
It’s hard to ignore how their respective races play into the disconnect between Cole and Zanab’s attraction to each other. Cole is white, while Zanab is biracial, born to a Pakistani father and white British mother. Her parents both died when she was young, leaving her to grow up with her white stepmother. While Raven is also a woman of color, Colleen—whom Cole repeatedly expressed his strongest attraction to—is a conventionally attractive white woman.
While Zanab never cited this as a reason why Cole may have expressed more interest in Colleen than Zanab, his whiteness did explicitly inform other pre-breakup tensions. Cole casually made other comments during the season that alienated Zanab or singled out her race as a core difference. “I proposed to a girl named Zanab,” he told her when she found out about his flirting with Colleen. “Do you think I thought, ‘She looked more like the girls I dated in the past that were named Lily?’”
One conversation in particular highlighted what part race played into their relationship. Cole’s devout Baptist parents didn’t want to meet Zanab until after the wedding, for reasons he suggested may relate to his having been married once before and that this was for a reality show. It was a decision that Zanab’s stepmother implied might be because of racism. She’s gonna think ‘What have I done? Do they not like me because of my skin color?” Zanab’s stepmother, Beverly, told Cole when they first met. Cole assured Beverly that his family would love Zanab once they were married, but it was clear their disinterest in the wedding was a source of uneasiness for Zanab and her family.
It wasn’t just issues of race that seemed to make Zanab uneasy around Cole. During the reunion episode, Zanab said she felt as though Cole had tried to control her diet, citing an incident where he questioned whether she should eat two Cuties, a brand of mini-tangerine oranges, saying she should save her appetite. Cole denied caring about what she ate and suggested Zanab might be lying about him having said it all. But a clip showed that the events in the scene matched Zanab’s account almost exactly, although his intentions didn’t seem outwardly malicious in the clip.
But when you consider all the moments that led up to it, it’s painfully clear why the Cuties conversation felt triggering to Zanab—and more importantly, why Cole should have known to be more careful with his words around what she ate or her size. (When she mentioned during that same conversation that she hadn’t eaten that day, he asked if she was working on her “wedding bod.”) The time Cole and Zanab spent together in person ahead of their break-up at the altar was marked by Cole’s comments on Zanab’s looks and Zanab’s increasingly hurt feelings because of them.
But it seems that the majority of viewers have forgotten about these moments, as well as forgotten the pain that Zanab expressed that grew exponentially every moment she was with Cole. Instead, Twitter and Reddit are filled with posts and comments about how she was so mean, even abusive toward Cole both during their relationship and in the reunion. A pre-finale article on Psychology Today (written by, it must be said, a white female clinical psychologist) even predicted that if Cole and Zanab were to marry, it wouldn’t last; the author listed Zanab’s actions as the sole reasons for this, accusing her of gaslighting Cole and not once delving into his behavior towards her.
In demonizing Zanab for her treatment and comments toward Cole—for rejecting him at the altar, as well as moments during the season in which she reprimanded him or corrected him for mistakes he made—Love Is Blind fans are also infantilizing Cole. In part due to their five-year age difference, viewers have ascribed to him a cute sort of immaturity, causing all of Zanab’s discomfort with his inability to communicate or clean properly with nagging. But it’s also easy to read Cole’s supposed immaturity as a weapon he uses to avoid accountability and gain sympathy. Yet after the finale, viewers have chosen to look the other way.
It’s important to point out that not only have the other cast members remained firmly on Zanab’s side, but prior to Zanab breaking up with him, the fanbase was also pretty anti-Cole. Viewers were seemingly in agreement that Cole treated Zanab poorly, even if she did seem passive aggressive toward him. It wasn’t until she rejected him and stood up for himself—and he responded with tears and denial—that the tide shifted. By changing teams, fans confirmed the power of white male fragility, and the idea that women of color are supported as long as they aren’t too “harsh.”
The critical speech she delivered to Cole before leaving him at the altar wasn’t the first time Zanab had expressed those thoughts. Yet it seemed like it was the first time Cole had come close to actually hearing her; prior to that, he used his seeming immaturity to get out of accountability. His reaction to Zanab at the wedding stands in contrast to earlier in the season, when he apologized to Colleen’s fiancé, Matt Bolton, for telling Colleen of his attraction to her. In that conversation, Cole was mature and genuinely apologetic, refraining from deflection and protecting Colleen by taking all the blame, in a way we’d never seen him act with Zanab.
But his defensiveness and tears when Zanab confronted him at the altar and at the reunion, combined with his insistence that he was taken aback by her words, triggered in viewers a sense of protectiveness. That feeling was only heightened in conjunction with Zanab’s firm pushback both on the show and social media. No one likes to see the cute white boy cry. They like it even less when it’s a woman of color that’s “made” him feel bad.
Reality show viewers always want to have a villain, and Zanab, who was honest and outspoken about her insecurities, was an easy target. People often find it easier to sympathize with white men, because that’s how we’re conditioned to act in society. But why the hypocrisy? Zanab’s rejected bids for connection, like playfully asking Cole how he feels about her physically and hearing that he thinks other women are more attractive in response, were deemed “insecure,” when Cole’s own attempts, like shooting a Nerf gun at Zanab while she cooks and her telling him to stop, were seen as evidence that he was a victim of a cold and humorless woman.
It’s a frustrating societal problem that Love Is Blind fans are now complicit in. The issue isn’t that people identify with Cole, like Cole, or feel bad for Cole. The issue is that they can’t hold the same compassion for Zanab as they can for him. The reunion has left viewers feeling as though it’s easier to feel badly for a white man than a woman of color, one who stood her ground against a white man. The show’s fanbase is so willing—eager, even—to withhold sympathy for Zanab’s discomfort and trauma from the relationship. Instead, they’re giving it to the person who clearly hurt her, Cole.
But the online backlash to Zanab is intense and unfair; she’s had to turn off her Instagram comments to stymie the harassment following the finale’s premiere. Most of all, as a fan of the show, it’s sad to realize that other viewers are so resistant to seeing Zanab for who she is: a beautiful woman of color who is just as capable of being hurt and deserving of protection as the white man she left crying at the altar.
