The U.S. marriage rate has spent the past few decades kneeling into obscurity. No one gets railed anymore, either—surveys show that Americans have never been so depressed, isolated, and revirginized as they are in the passionless present. But I’m convinced that Love is Blind Season 6, whose finale premiered Wednesday, is the true death of romance. Its couples’ will-they, won’t-they whining tantalized our loneliness—while reinforcing the doomed state of modern marriage.
The frazzled idealists on Love is Blind don’t know what they’re doing, coveting a marriage license like it’s a Birkin, but neither do we. Via hosts Nick and Vanessa Lachey, marriage has been reduced to just a thing you can do instead of looking at your phone.
That’s not how Love is Blind presents it, of course. Like the rest of reality TV that hinges on a marriage plot—The Bachelor, Married at First Sight, The Ultimatum, 90 Day Fiancé, etc.—Love is Blind starts as a mango-sweet hyperreality. Its couples are presented to us as a winning selection from an already limited selection, the cream skimmed off the shallow pool of eligible contestants who all claim to be in it for “the right reasons,” to borrow The Bachelor parlance.
The bounds determining “the right reasons” depend on who you ask and how much filler they have in their upper lip. But some red flags are obvious. Season 6 contestant Matt, for example, seemed too stiff to immediately read as an influencer wannabe. But when he started sweating over how “America's gonna be watching” the way he tried and failed to manipulate his love interests, I began wondering if Patrick Bateman would have done well on TikTok.
Those who do couple up on Love is Blind are shown as inherently marriage material. After they leave the pods—the windowless lounges they use for talking and, ultimately, getting engaged —they’re put on the fast track to legal partnership. Upon accepting a proposal, the couples meet in a carpeted sound stage. They see and touch each other for the first time, and they pretend like it turns them on (“I love your hair!” Amy tells her receding, strawberry-blond fiancé Johnny, right before admitting to the confession cam that she usually prefers “ethnic men”). This is followed by a week-long honeymoon, then 21 days of trying to integrate into each other’s lives before deciding if they want to go through with the show’s scheduled wedding.
The Season 6 couples have myriad motivations for putting themselves through this embarrassing ordeal on Netflix, some of which are intractable. In the pods, 25-year-old Kenneth tells his beaming, soon-to-be fiancée Brittany that his “mindset” and “mentalities have never been average for my age;” so, OK, he craves a quick engagement when the average marrying age for men in the U.S. is 30. But then, when he gets the girl, he's immediately bored with his toy. He becomes increasingly impassive throughout their Dominican Republic honeymoon, only breaking the awkward silence on a boat ride to inform Brittany, who is longingly squeezing his arm, that he rode a dolphin in the Bahamas once, and it was “an amazing experience.”
Mrs. Potato Head Chelsea, who complains of always getting cheated on, tells us in a dainty North Carolina drawl that all she wants is to be the main attraction. “I’m so used to going on a date with a guy, and there being a TV behind me. And he’s just watching the football game,” she says in a confessional. Marriage, with its implied knightly fealty, is a good way to shake some devotion out of a guy. But when her fiancé, Mr. Potato Head Jimmy, declares in his suntanned Carolina twang that he loves her, he loves her, he loves her, Chelsea rejects it.
“I don’t know [if you love me],” she sighs, one minute and 11 seconds after Jimmy once again assures her that “I love you. I’m in this for you.”
Watching this produces a witch’s cauldron of feeling. First, a pinch of jealousy: Can you imagine how indulgent it would feel to be that self-absorbed in public? Then, a scoop of frustration: Here’s a man willing to change his life in under a month and marry you, and you’re pissing all over the opportunity? If it were me…
Well, really, if it were me, I’d have left before Jimmy had the opportunity to look at hourglass Amber “AD” Desiree and call her “absolutely stacked.” Or before that weasel Jeramey decided to give up on his fiancée Laura and instead ride jet skis with his No. 2, Sarah Ann. Or before Sarah Ann vowed not to be a “pick me” until she sent the engaged Jeramey a DM inquiring if he was interested. (His mom got mad at him.)
Like most reality TV, Love is Blind is a sad highlight reel of the insecurities that stop its social media-devouring, dropshipper, medical-equipment-sales-representative cast from finding companionship in the real world, but Season 6 is worse than that. Its cast members remind me of friends, kids from my high school, and ugly parts of me. Like the Season 6 couples, I get scared. Sometimes I cry when I’m alone in my room. Through the tears, marriage with the first person who’s willing seems like a painless antidote to painful solitude.
In my more naive past, I’ve imagined marriage as a second baptism. “Once I’m married,” I’d think, “I’ll feel better.” But on winter nights or slow days, I notice that I still think that way. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t spend so much of my free time watching Love is Blind like an obsessive hunter, looking for another Achilles’ heel to sink my judgment into. I want it, but I don’t want it.
The Season 6 couples are beleaguered by the same contradictions. Most of them spend each episode fighting like kitties over a tray of milk, competing with each other over who can be more dedicated, more committed, but ultimately, only Amy and Johnny tie the knot. That’s the lowest retention rate for any Love is Blind season (though, not by much—the franchise averages two marriages a season).
It’s disheartening to watch some of these people act like marriage is a suture. Chelsea, for example, can’t comprehend why her drunken, unfair accusations that hanging out at a bar for an hour makes Jimmy a liar, lush, and cheater make him distrust her too much to even approach the altar.
“Why did you propose to me?” Chelsea says after 10 episodes of berating Jimmy, minimizing his feelings, and begging him for reassurance any time he demonstrated free will. “I feel like you weren't even trying to get married.” Marriage, to her, is a Band-Aid for sour insecurity, a sugary salve for the complex anxieties warping her affections and perspective.
When I fall asleep at night, I dream that love is better than an off-the-shelf Band-Aid; it should be natural, a deeply sweet honey embedded in a comb. Wasn’t it kind of epic when Dante said in La Vita Nuova that, the first time his childhood crush Beatrice greeted him, “I came into such sweetness that I parted thence as one intoxicated?” Does anyone even voice-memo shit like that anymore?
“And betaking me to the loneliness of mine own room,” Dante continues, “I was overtaken by a pleasant slumber, wherein a marvelous vision was presented to me: for there appeared to be in my room a mist of the color of fire.” I believe that is the truth of love: Your conscious and subconscious are filled with welcome flames as your pretenses melt; your hesitations about yourself and the world shrink in the face of it.
Love is Blind, however, is content with presenting love as drinking so many martinis you accidentally end up at the altar with producers around. The officiant, menacingly, ends his lovely speech with a reminder that this isn't real life: “Will you get married and commit to face your life together as husband and wife, or will you walk away forever?” Its contestants are hardly even grazed by the shackles of desire. They don’t appear to experience pointed lust or longing; they only have Johnny agonizing over not being able to have sex with Amy, who isn’t on birth control, and has apparently never heard of condoms. How disappointing. I thought the whole point of a show like Love is Blind—to its lonely, untouched viewership—is to treat marriage like a fantasy. But we can’t even get that right.
