It’s a long and winding road that leads to love, as contestants learn on the Netflix show, “Love Is Blind.” Also, this is a look at autumn colors showing up near my town these days.
I confess that I just finished watching the latest season of “Love Is Blind” on Netflix with my daughter.
It is okay if you feel a little judgy about this. It’s sort of the television equivalent of snacking on Cheez-Its or Nacho Cheese Flavored Doritos, which I love, but which I very much try not to buy, because I always end up eating the entire bag.
(Case in point: a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Pumpkin treats jumped into my shopping bag the other day. I believe they are all gone now.)
I am not alone in watching it, though; it’s the number one most-watched streaming series of all time. In the show, young, unmarried singles meet and date other young, unmarried singles through a wall. They swear that they are ready to get married, but they just have not been able to find their person in their day-to-day lives. In the show, they cannot see each other, but enjoy hours of conversation where they forge connections without worrying about physical appearances, something that had been important to them in the past.
You see them share their hearts. Every season, a few of the couples enjoy such deep connections through their days of dating through the wall that they fall in love—truly, madly, deeply! The young man proposes, the young woman cries, and says yes! Soon after, the audience watches the unveiling, where the two come together for the first time on the opposite sides of sliding doors. The doors open and they finally see each other. He gets down on one knee, pulls out an engagement ring, puts it on her finger.
There are hugs and kisses! Everything is wonderful!
Until it’s not.
And it’s that part, when things start to fall apart, that interests me the most.
The engaged couples are then jetted away to a romantic getaway in Mexico, where problems inevitably start to arise. Later, they return to their hometowns and live together for a short time as their wedding days approach. Some couples are able to work through their difficulties and come out stronger, but not everybody does. If they make it to the altar (and not every couple does, because some break up before then), they are told by the officiant that “now is the time to decide if love truly is blind.” Spoiler alert, if you’re thinking about watching this current season: none of the couples decide to actually marry, the first time in the show’s history that this has happened.
There is a predictable trajectory that the relationships follow: from bliss and elation to harsh reality. Some couples are able to work their way back to a strong connection, but those who don’t have dramatic conflicts and breakdowns for all of us to watch. I hate to admit it, but I think I have a little schadenfreude going on here—that German word that describes the guilty pleasure we take from somebody else’s misfortune. Because the truth is that most of us have had relationships that began blissfully that later crashed and burned. So when the idyllic relationships on the show start to crumble? It’s not pretty, but it makes the rest of us feel like we’re not alone in the heartbreaks and breakups we’ve suffered.
We see it happen to the show’s gorgeous young people, who generally end up being social media influencers and gain followers through their time on the show (some of them up to a million!), so in the end, we don’t need to feel too bad for them. But the show still serves as a reminder that relationships are not easy for anyone. That’s reason enough to look forward to the next season, which will probably be out soon–while also hoping that at least some of the next set of participants will find relationships that are healthy and enter into marriages that last, because that’s always the goal. That’s always the hope.
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