Love is Blind, and not in a good way

On being willing to ignore all the red flags and why a good marriage isn't a fantasy

I’d wanted to avoid writing about Love Is Blind in this newsletter because I wanted to be better than that but then I watched the latest episode in my car, on my phone, at 8:45am on Wednesday, so now here we are.

The show, for anyone living under a rock with no Netflix or Instagram (I envy you) is about ostensibly straight men and women who meet behind closed doors–called pods–and essentially speed date until they are ready to propose to one of the other participants. Some of you readers will stop there and again, I support you. For those of you who continue: all that gets filmed and well as their first moments out of the pods and the first weeks of their in-person relationships where they encounter all the rocky things one might while living with and being engaged to someone they barely know. At the end of the shooting period they are asked to go to the altar where they decide whether they will marry their pick and live as a couple off camera for the rest of eternity. Let’s just for a moment pretend that any sane person would sign up for this. And then let’s take a good look at the men. 

The evilest person in this season (6) in my book is Jimmy. Jimmy creates a love triangle in the pods where he is attracted (emotionally) to a woman who is a single mom and also to another woman who is divorced. He chooses Chelsea, the divorcee, and they are off to the races, meeting with excitement along a long runway that stretches between two closed doors they are each standing behind. As soon as they kiss and embrace they take a seat on a couch and he says to her, I almost left the show this morning. Don’t tell me that, she says, looking shocked. What? he asks. It wasn’t about you. I thought I could tell you anything. You can tell me anything, she replies. I can’t think of a more fucked up way to start an engagement, besides having met without seeing each other during a limited time period where you are also being filmed. 

Their filmed life continues during which she repeatedly reaches out for more love and affection and he repeatedly tells her he loves her but does not affirm her in the way that she asks. She gets more and more confused and he continues to string her along until the very last night where they go and have this pre-wedding date. They carve a literal ice sculpture with their initials and they sit down to have a chat, in which he asks her how she is feeling about their upcoming wedding. She admits that it does feel day-by-day but after that particular day she was feeling really good. She says it with a genuine smile and warmth and you’d have to be a coldblooded reptile to respond the way he does, which is to say that he can’t fathom marrying her and makes a list of the things that she’s done that make her unmarriable to him. Many of these points include standing up for herself, asserting her needs, calling him out on bullshit and not letting one good day mean that they are in the clear forever. They break up with out him admitting that he’s secretly still in love with the single mom to whom he’s already, ON CAMERA, said is “in reality” his first choice.

There are four more couples and I’ll run through the men’s shenanigans briefly. Clay, partnered to AD–who is literally President of the United States material in terms of her poise, clarity and life experience dealing with difficulty–turns AD down at the altar because he just doesn’t understand what the big deal about marriage is exactly. Let’s be clear, he posed this question to her before standing in front of her dressed in a tuxedo, to which she replied: we signed up for an experiment where we meet without seeing each other and decide whether to get married. That’s what she’s doing and that’s what she’s expecting, whether the answer is yes or no. But she says clearly that if the answer is no, she would not continue to date him thereafter. Woah, he says in response. He acts like he understands, keeps filming, says she’s everything and more and then says no at the altar. 

AD shakes her head. There are no words.

One could easily have a field day with Jeramey but as his ex-fiance Lauren says, he doesn’t deserve the attention. The clincher scene is easy and short: it’s the night before Lauren is about to meet Jeramey’s mom and in the morning he tells her he was out all night with the other person in the pods who he was considering marrying. He is wearing sunglasses at the start of this conversation as if he has a split personality or is in a bad CIA disguise. She calls him out on the sunglasses and he takes them off and she cross-examines him like she’s a highly paid lawyer, which I sure hope she is. The rest is messy, as the season films more scenes in which they are in the same place and he continues to say that there was an open door for her to a marriage, while actively pursuing another woman in the same breath. In their last private conversation she tells him to eat dirt and have a nice life and I have to agree.

The other two couples are less fun because of how subtle but dangerous their sexual dynamics are. Ok here we go:

Amy and her fiance have no disagreements which is their red flag. They end up getting married but here are his unspoken terms: she will go on birth control, because he is way too scared of getting her pregnant while using condoms and him having to provide for a family before he is ready. Truthfully, she seems way more employable than him, but anyway. In one scene he says he looked into a vasectomy, since she suggested it was an viable option, and oh boy, he found out what it entails, which btw is a surgery that can be performed in an outpatient setting with local anesthesia. That, he reports, is A LOT. 

DUDE HAVE YOU EVER LOOKED UP WHAT HAPPENS DURING LABOR?

It’s unclear to me why neither of these people have ever heard of an ovulation cycle. 

Finally we have a couple who cut their ties early on in the post-pod filming days. What this comes down to, as I read it, is a woman who says, quite bravely, I think, that she needs him to be more actively creating a sexy vibe during the day if she’s going to want to say yes to his sexual advances at night. She’s not even prescribing a solution, but merely saying that sex and chemistry is something that a couple has to attend to just like all other aspects of marriage and she’d like to be sure he can commit to that too. He, readers, can not. In a calm and strange conversation he breaks up with her on the spot. BUT turns it around on her saying that he is attracted to her, so if she’s just not attracted to him, this wouldn’t be a good decision for either of them. This, of course, is not what she’s saying but he’s already called it and so this couple’s short lived relationship comes to a close. 

So, let’s review. What have we learned about the status quo of women seeking marriage?

• Women who know what they want do not get what they want and that is their fault

• Women who ask for what they want get told they are clingy and annoying

• Women who don’t want to be seen as clingy end up as emotional rocks 

• Emotional rocks suppress their own sexual needs and take the blame for bad chemistry

• With no sexual chemistry, women sub in “good dad” points for good husband points, of which there are none. 

  And then, we become mothers.

Is this what all relationships looks like? No of course it is not. Take this person I know, let’s call him my neighbor, who became his new son’s primary parent after his wife took her six weeks of maternity leave. Perhaps he had a better job, at least in terms of paid leave for parents, but he got a number of months, and so I’ve seen him go from sleeplessly starting at his new born with that what the-fuck-have-I-done-look on his face to a person who can tenderly pick up a child and hold him while also navigating a car seat stroller contraption that makes no amount of intuitive sense no matter how many times you open and close it. It is not rocket science to be a receptive person but it does take practice and this is as available to anyone who is willing to walk down the path. I’d argue that parenting puts you right on it and doesn’t let you off, but of course there are plenty of bad parents out there – men, women and sometimes any of us on a bad day. 

Am I having a bad day? Is that why I’m so mad about a television show? Well, actually I’m not. Although I am writing next to a small person who has just thrown up five times in 24 hours and who wants to tell me about their new technique of knowing which months have 30 days and which have 31, and by the way, my there are a lot of airplanes out today, and how much longer and I planning on writing. Also mommy, things that end in “tion,” do they all rhyme? I want some strawberries (which we do not have). Luckily, because I texted my friend yesterday about this exact predicament, we have popsicles (thank you Celeste!). 

After the first popsicle O says she wants another but she really just wants strawberries. I pause. I am choosing to finish this essay rather than go and buy strawberries. There is someone else in the house who could buy strawberries. Could I ask? Is it worth the breath? What will she remember about these moments. Which of the memory is important? What part of motherhood gets sacrificed in these moments and are they sacrifices I want to make? Who gets the shaft?

Mad Woman’s, Amanda Montei has interviewed Leslie Jamison for Electric Literature about her new memoir Splinters, which delves into this exact divide; the way that you become polarized as a mother without support: on the one hand seeing the inequity of your position in stronger and stronger light as you love your child more and more deeply – the two things related to each other intrinsically, in a way that threatens to tear you apart. Let’s hope I read it. 

It’s so easy to be like: why do these women still want to be married, when overall marriage still benefits men? I will forever be sobered by that statistic which is in itself a little hard to understand. Is it marriage that is the problem, or just the men to whom married women are partnered? Is it the institution of a legal partnership that’s the problem or just one in which the unwritten contract includes the agreement that one party does more? I loved the part in (I think it was She's Beautiful When She's Angry) a feminist documentary about second wave feminists who renegotiated their marriage contracts with more explicit terms, after their agreements were proving to be a bad deal. I think about it often and wonder why ,when dissatisfied by our partner’s ongoing sexism, we don’t write it all out and clarify what it would mean to be equal. Are we afraid of our own power? I think we can say I mean I when I say we. But also maybe you too.