Love isn’t blind, thankfully
Every time I find myself watching the TV show Love is Blind, it feels like I’m putting myself through a punishment. I watched the first season in its entirety. Since then, I’ve tended to skip it, but occasionally it pops up on the Netflix homepage and I think, ‘Okay, let’s get it over with’. My preferred viewing method is to watch the entire season within 1-2 hours, playing various essential infrastructural moments (proposal, first sighting, trip abroad, wedding I dos/don’ts).
A few thoughts on the ‘blind’ element of the show: What comes across in every season is that people are able to forge strong bonds with one another having never caught sight of each other. Without the self-judgement of one’s own appearance getting in the way and the nothing-to-lose starting premise, participants in the show or ‘experiment’ as they call it, enter the space fairly emotionally open. But ultimately, physical chemistry does matter and what the show tends to oversimplify is that neither love nor physical attraction depends on physical appearance.
To assess someone’s attractiveness on their physical appearance alone is indeed a shallow enterprise. Yet, the challenges couples face once they’re united go far beyond the intensity of an initial, undoubtedly intense, emotional connection. They have to discover whether they are actually compatible—whether they align on everything from lifestyle choices and values, to everyday routine, to sexual preferences and attachment style; all factors that tend to affect physical chemistry, and all things that they remain ‘blind’ to until they have the opportunity to get to know one another outside a controlled environment.
Every season, it feels like it’s a miracle if even one couple survives the process (/ordeal) all the way through to the end, let alone getting to the point of setting up house and home together. Yet it has and does happen.
During my skip-through of the latest season, I paused for longer than usual to watch one particular scenario play out. The couple I’m focusing on are Chris (apparently aged 33, although based on behaviour and babyface, I had him down as about 24) and Jessica, a 38-year-old physician.
Following their first physical meeting, the couple initially appear smitten. But, in subsequent episodes, although they are aligned on some major things (like not necessarily wanting to have children) you start to get the impression that there are things about Jessica that are beginning to put Chris off. Perhaps, for example, her taste in home décor, which he comments is heavily oriented towards gold and snakes, and her excessive walk-in wardrobe. ‘You have a lot of clothes’ he says, wide-eyed, looking a little scared. Jessica is clearly someone who’s comfortable with and settled into her own lifestyle, a lifestyle that Chris can’t perhaps see himself enjoying. From the outside, it looks to me like Chris gets the ick.
And from this point, when he stops being able to see a future with Jessica, he simultaneously stops being attracted to her. But, perhaps unable to explain to himself what has happened, he refocuses his attention on the superficial rather than their actual incompatibility, beginning to drop hints about how his usual type is a woman who works out every day and specifically, “does Pilates”.
Relaying these thoughts to Jessica directly, you see flickers of anguish appear on her face, hurt dilating her pupils. You see her silently question herself, her own desirability. You witness the self-esteem crushing impact of emotional immaturity and cowardice taking effect in real time. It’s excruciating to watch.
From then on, Chris destructively spirals. During a reunion with the ‘pod squad’, while still engaged to Jessica, and several too many drinks deep, Chris announces repeatedly that he doesn’t “give a flying fuck” and proceeds to disclose to some of the female contestants that Jessica is not his type because she doesn’t work out or do Pilates. Almost immediately after this, he brazenly comes on strongly to Bri, another female contestant with whom he previously shared a connection before she coupled off with emotionally secure Connor—a cast member with whom, up until that point, Chris has been ‘bros’.
Having irrevocably broken bro code, offended not only the woman he’s engaged to but womankind herself, and pissed everyone else off with his drunken belligerence, Chris is recast as the season’s cartoon villain.
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So, fast-forward to the season’s ‘reunion’ episode—during which the status of all the relationships is revealed—I am truly amazed to see Chris on-stage. I appreciate he was probably contractually obliged, but I’m still impressed he actually made it.
Typically, these episodes make for uncomfortable viewing with almost a year separating season filming and this one-off, during which time various things have played out, including break-ups, new partners, marriages and even pregnancies…Hostility is to be expected, although I can’t recall a reunion episode quite as awkward as this one.
Jessica, seated on the opposite sofa, flanked by supportive pod squad women, still appears emotionally shaken by the experience.
Visibly red-faced, given more physical space than the other cast members, and regularly negatively alluded to in the first half of the episode, is Chris, who you almost start to feel sorry for. When Connor—unmarried, but still in a relationship with Bri—is asked what he thinks of Chris, Connor responds ‘I don’t think of him’.
The camera moves cruelly between cutting comments and Chris’s reaction to them. His role for this episode is one of humiliation and he accepts it; he doesn’t become defensive or aggressive. Instead, he endures the deserved comments, the deserved mockery, and the deserved audience laughter.
Following a confrontational excavation of his behaviour on television, the hosts ask Chris if there’s anything he wants to say directly to the other cast members, and to his credit – without making any excuses for himself or his behaviour – Chris takes responsibility and apologises to the three cast members he hurt.
What makes these apologies feel genuine is that he recognises and names what it is he is apologising for, the actions that caused harm—whether it was putting someone in a difficult situation, betraying someone’s trust, or doing them a disservice by not being honest. He acknowledges that he needs to work on himself and that he wants to take the necessary steps to behave better in the future.
It seemed to me that his apologies were taken as intended and accepted. I don’t suppose he expected anyone to instantly re-friend him as a result. Forgiveness doesn’t equate to restored friendship. A genuine apology, in my opinion, should be given with no expectation of reciprocity or return, but the acknowledgement inherent within an apologetic act can do much to repair, restore civility and mutual humanity. And, vitally, it enables people to move on.
As the words come out of his mouth, I think I detect Jessica’s shoulders lift. She thanks him for his apology.
It’s always frustrating and bittersweet to be the person who helps someone learn a lesson you’d rather they needn’t have had to learn in the first place, yet I do believe forgiveness is something people want to give and are often ready to, given the opportunity.
Watching Chris, I felt wishful—for all the apologies left unsaid, from others towards myself, but also apologies I might have made. And then, on a societal level, a wish for a kind of recovery from the pervasive sense that to apologise is to admit wrongdoing—and that wrongdoing is unrecoverable. This is what I disagree with.
In the moments following, I noticed the way my compassion for Chris slowly began to restore, like water trickling into a toilet cistern.
It was gratifying to hear that Jessica has since moved on with another cast member, Haramol, who was sitting in the audience. When passed the mic, he made an impassioned speech (paraphrased here): “We call this an experiment. But to experiment with a woman’s heart—to awaken a woman’s heart with no intention of following through—to me, that’s like a sin!”
I hope it works out for them. Perhaps I’ve been infected by the sun, but I’m feeling optimistic.