Flirting Is Dying, and Love Is Blind Proves It
Netflix, we have a problem.
In Love Is Blind Season 5, which debuted its first four episodes on Friday, strangers “fall in love” while communicating through a wall. This season, in the absence of outstanding personalities or strong chemistry between couples, the series’ major weakness has become glaring: Eliminating physical presence completely kills flirtation. (OK, yes, this flirting flaw has existed since Season 1, but without even one Season 5 couple that feels like they might stand a chance post-pods, it’s getting harder to ignore!)
The series’ mission is noble: Undo the vapid world of online dating, where scrolls are fast and likes are few, by falling in love with someone while sitting in adjoined “pods” and conversing from opposite sides of a wall without the distraction of physical appearance. Despite the show’s attempt to reverse online dating’s superficial swipe-to-sex pipeline, Love Is Blind has a similar bottom line: Always be optimizing. Flirting is frivolous and wastes time. Get right into the things that matter — finances, career goals and childhood trauma — to bypass falling in love and go straight to being in love.
This season’s contestants have become their own HR reps, screening potential suitors with empty questions that directly impact the chance for a subsequent conversation. As strangers pair up, sight unseen, we watch Lydia ask, “Are you a morning person?” and Stacy inquire, “What do you like to do for fun?” Are you head over heels yet? No? Try a fun fact!
Contestants just can’t wait to share random bits of information about themselves like they’re breaking the ice at a corporate retreat. Stacy likes darts and can guess men’s shoe sizes just by looking at their feet; Izzy and Johnie value intelligence, partnership and stability. And Milton? Milton loves rocks.
In a particularly surprising moment, Johnie slips in an “I love you” during her first hangout with Izzy like a child accidentally calling her teacher “Mom.” Conflating like and love isn’t flirting, it’s just confusing. But then again, why get bogged down by the nuances of like when you can just skip right to love?
And when Milton asks Lydia if she’s ready to “dive into something real” in Episode 3 — as if he’s a DVD aerobics instructor ready to transition from warm-up to workout — the man really has no other choice. What else can you do alone in a room if not attempt to “dive into something real”? And he can’t just “dive into something real” without verbally signposting that he is indeed about to “dive into something real” because the pair hasn’t developed the kind of closeness that can only be fostered by breathing the same air, sharing the same space. When you flirt, you begin to understand a person’s subtle hints that conversation is shifting.
By separating the physical from the emotional, the show robs contestants of all the tantalizing and ineffable fruits of letting a discussion breathe and communicating nonverbally, albeit vaguely. Conversation can’t take an unexpected turn thanks to a look, a laugh or a dramatic stir of the drink. The show ultimately erases the particulars of a person, the things that can’t be conveyed in a verbal answer to a question.
And Love Is Blind shouldn’t be dismissed as manufactured reality TV — the series simply magnifies a familiar cultural phenomenon. We are no better than Milton, Stacy and the rest. Real-life dating, like TV dating, has become not about the joys of discovery, flirting, or falling in love, but about getting to the point. What are we? Where is this going? What are you looking for? Dating apps even encourage users to share exactly what they want to avoid spending time with someone whose expectations don’t align with yours. Remove the incidental fluff, communicate clearly and get it over with already — never waste time.
But can time be wasted? Isn’t it sometimes thrilling to be clueless, indirect and vague? When you brush fingers with someone at Whole Foods reaching for a mango, isn’t it exciting to mentally spiral into all the pleasurable possibilities, not knowing what’s about to happen? You should give them a look that encourages conversation, but you shouldn’t ask about their romantic expectations, credit score and emotional trauma to decide whether they’re worthy of a date.
To flirt is to experiment, to turn an interaction into an intimate dream sequence by dipping in and out of the superficial and the serious, to invite another person into personality play that ebbs and flows to the beat of an unexpected rhythm. To flirt is to have fun and without it, Love Is Blind is on the precipice of reality TV ruin: predictability.
So I propose a sequel series: Love Is Silent, where a group of hopeful singles must come face-to-face with prospective partners and decide if they can fall in love without any verbal communication whatsoever. Let us know in the comments if you’d watch! Or, better yet, just bite your lip and bat your eyes. We’ll know what you mean.
I would not watch. Love is silent is the picture part of online dating because so many people swipe without looking at the bio.
Season 2 there was a guy that at the end said the show wasn’t about getting married or falling in love. He didn’t mean it the way you are because he came off like a jerk.
I see your point but the reason so many people are on that show (besides fame) is because they don’t want the physical on the table. Flirting can come after they get engaged and meet. But there is verbal flirting and that is always going to be mostly awkward. The reason it isn’t always obvious is because you have this person in front of you.
This awkwardness with bland questions probably happens at speed dating too.
The show is about building that mental/emotional connection before the physical comes up.
I also think a few of these weirdo were falling in love, those important moments weren’t always aired. And you are right people confuse like with love all the time.
However, it can’t be ignore that this show has a better success rate than other dating shows and I think it is because they cut to the chase and are vulnerable.
non verbal in person would be different than just looking at a picture though. Seeing if you can pick up on each other’s non verbal cues and mesh in that way would be at least a little more interesting.
To boil the core argument down to a single sentence: love in the modern world feels a bit too much like interviewing for a job.
I think the ‘lack of flirting’ is only a big problem if you are looking for flirting to be a major part of the series. IMO, I don’t think people are watching for ‘flirting’ they are watching to see if people will really get engaged to someone sight unseen.
I also do not think the show’s mission is necessarily to actually get people married. They’ve been very, very deliberate in their marketing and language to consistently call it ‘an experiment.’ To see if people *could* be attracted to someone without seeing them physically and if so could that actually lead to marriage. Obviously that only works up to a point e.g. Irina and Zach from S4 whereupon actually seeing him she called him ‘crrepy’ or the recent Brazil episode where the guy went back on the engagement because the woman was heavyset.
And finally, it is a tv show after all. They are crafting narratives around the couples. If I had to point out a major flaw is that they don’t show enough of the pod footages across all the cast. They know the ending (who ends up together, who gets engaged) etc. so they edit toward that. They create the story. There may well have been some flirting but we’d never see it because it isn’t deemed tv worthy. By all accounts from the contestants, they go on dates that last hours and hours over a period of seven days and we only see at most 20 minutes on average per couple.
For every way this show has become horrid, watch Love is a blind Brazil. THIS is the show. Editing is minimal, SEE the ‘connections’
So disappointed with the Love is Blind series. Pretty sad when a bunch of young adults have such foul mouths and are allowed to use it. Shame on them and the producers, for allowing it. I for one will never watch it again.