Here’s Everything Toxic About Netflix’s Most Talked About Reality Show

Unfortunately, we live in a post-pandemic world. For many Gen Z, this meant sacrificing their first crucial years of adulthood to extended, Zoom-fueled stays in their parents’ bedrooms. For the rest of us, this meant having plenty of time to binge Season 1 of Love is Blind and talk about Jessica’s Baby Voice.

At that time, this seemed perfectly natural. Healthy, even. It was easy to forget that there were real people in those pods, and that their actions and attitudes might affect those of us viewers. Five years later, we know better. After years of scandals, lawsuits, think pieces, and memes, we realize now that love is not quite blind, and is in fact perfectly capable of seeing. Of course, we still watch, since addictive, soporific TV is an easier pill to swallow than several minutes of deep, introspective thinking, but Love is Blind is rotting our brains in more ways than one. Let’s get into it. This will be fun! 

The preoccupation with age 

Speaking of Jessica, she originated an unfortunate template on this show: The Age Gap Anxiety storyline. Despite being happy and comfortable around Mark, 10 years her junior, Jessica continued to wring her hands over the age difference, allowing her self-saboteur to systematically dismantle her relationship. If she had just taken a step back and realized that the relationship still worked despite the difference, she could have let it go. Still, Jessica allowed a fear of imbedded societal misogyny and ageism to ruin her happiness, subconsciously teaching viewers to avoid age-gap relationships at all costs.

This isn’t healthy! Age is not a signifier of maturity – Mark is a clear example – and millennials sometimes possess more emotional maturity in their ring finger than three fully-grown baby boomers. By following Jessica’s lead, viewers and future Love is Blind contestants have closed themselves off to age gap relationships, potentially precluding them from enlightenment and personal growth.

Men joining the “experiment” to fix themselves

There’s nothing wrong with growth. I literally just recommended it two sentences ago. But a reality show is not a good substitute for therapy. In Season 8, David seemed like your typical average LIB villain, negging women left and right. But then he declared that he wanted to change, and hoped that LIB would be the catalyst. First of all, when has a reality show ever made someone a better person? Has a Real Housewife ever won a Nobel Prize? Did the cast of Bad Girls Club go on to broker peace in Gaza? Second, I couldn’t finish this season, but according to the Internet, someone actually got engaged to him after that. What? This had to be for TV and TV alone, because what sane person is going to believe a guy’s going to change in just a few days? In real life, if someone tells you up front they have a toxic personality and that they’re hoping to fix that by taking a trip to Honduras, you run. 

Speaking of which…

David arrived on Love is Blind with a well-defined goal: to stop being toxic. This in turn gave him a well-defined storyline: Boy meets girl, boy stops being toxic through the power of love, love is blind. Neat! Basically, David wrote a storyline for himself and hoped that the producers of LIB would find it sexy enough to give him airtime. He was right. He clearly didn’t care who he ended up with; his one obvious goal was to become a character, one who would incidentally get a free trip to Honduras.

In the same season, a woman showed up and claimed right out the gate that she had never been in a relationship. How could the Love is Blind producers pass up the opportunity to make that happen for her, and out of the kindness of their hearts, no less! My point is that Love is Blind stopped being an experiment after Season 1. Now, it’s a questionable and unnecessarily complicated ticket to social media fame, and savvy players know exactly how to stand out in their seasons.

The lack of sexual diversity 

The heteronormativity of Love is Blind has been talked about to death ever since Season 1 normalized Diamond’s biphobia towards Carlton, all while reinforcing damaging stereotypes about STIs and same-sex relationships between men. The show has never once tried to grapple with this legacy and continues to parade milquetoast heterosexual relationships, year after year. This show is not meant for someone like me, and unsurprisingly I haven’t finished a full season since 2020. Would it kill producers to have a sexually fluid season, à la Are You the One or The Ultimatum? Or would they rather continue to perpetuate ignorance and minimize queer representation in one of Netflix’s biggest hits? I’m waiting. But in the meantime, they should probably resolve some of those multiple lawsuits.