This article contains spoilers for Season 9 of “Love Is Blind.”
I see faces in everything — a slice of Swiss cheese, the front of a sedan, even an electrical outlet. So when I watched “Love Is Blind” with a blanket draped over my television, I didn’t think it would be difficult to imagine what the participants looked like.
I was wrong.
Participants of Netflix’s popular dating series are single people who say they are ready for marriage, and they enter “the experiment,” as the show’s creator Chris Coelen calls it, where they date potential partners through individual “pods,” in which they can speak to each other but cannot see each other. They each aim to find their future husband or wife, and it isn’t until they are already engaged that they see each other. Four weeks later, they say “I do” — assuming all goes well, and it usually doesn’t.
As a devoted fan of the series, I decided to get a taste of the experiment myself with Season 9. I watched the first six episodes, where the participants are blindly dating each other, completely blind myself. Only when the couples revealed themselves to each other did I see them. I call it “Love Is Double Blind.” (Although the trend of watching the show this way has popped up on social media, that moniker has not.)
What I learned from my own experiment is that it’s somewhat easy to see (or rather hear, I suppose) which couples work on a fundamental level and which couples don’t when your judgment is not clouded by appearances. I also realized pretty much everyone looked nothing like what I had pictured, which could be what some participants experience after seeing the person they’re supposed to very quickly marry for the first time.
I diligently took notes as I listened to the early episodes (just like the participants do on their pod dates) and broke down my thoughts episode by episode. From Sparkle Megan’s competing love interests to the dramatic breakups this season, all of the drama and the cringe were still present, even through this unusual viewing experience.
