Love Is Blind is the first Netflix dating phenomenon, however, lots of viewers are wondering: why are there no ‘ugly’ contestants?
Before you barrage me with insults and comments about my insensitivity to people’s looks and lecture me on how attraction is subjective and all that jazz – I know. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, after all.
However, the participants in the the streaming platform’s latest dating-cum-marriage show have a plateaued level of attractiveness – they’re all fairly standard, good-looking people. But how does that strengthen Love Is Blind’s thesis?
Netflix’s synopsis for the show reads: ‘Nick and Vanessa Lachey host this social experiment where single men and women look for love and get engaged, all before meeting the person.’
We follow 30 contestants – 15 men and women – who start off speed-dating each other from behind the walls of individual pods, unable to see each other, limiting them to just talking. After that period of time, each man can propose to the woman he’d like to marry – despite having never met (yikes).
If it’s a yes, they can then see each other in the real world, and the show follows the new couples as they get to know each other in the flesh. After moving in together and meeting friends and family, they are then able to get married.
The name of the show stems from the famous idiom, as penned by William Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice: ‘Love is blind and lovers cannot see, the pretty follies, that themselves commit.’ The idea is that everything can be overlooked if you have a connection with the person – however, that’s an easy ivory tower to stand atop when you’re reasonably attractive.
Twitter users are wise to the show’s tactics. One user wrote: ‘The problem with Love Is Blind is all the people are good looking. Put some fat broads and toothless guys without jobs. Now that’s a reality show.’
Another critic of the show wrote: ‘Love Is Blind has one problem, they’re all normal good-looking people, all are at minimum a hard six. Get a range, super models to some bridge trolls. I want to see a -4 bag a 10.’
One particularly scathing criticism read: ‘All contestants on Love Is Blind are really good looking because the show is asking a completely different question – one that’s harder to cram into a pithy Netflix title: Is being in a relationship hard even for hot people with personality disorders? Why yes. Yes it is.’
We inhabit a media cycle that – with the likes of Love Island and ubiquity of Instagram models – worships ‘hotness’ like a religion. The show may be entertaining, but its either knowingly side-stepping the point, or blind to its own weakness.
If you have a story you want to tell, send it to UNILAD via story@unilad.com
After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.