‘love Is Blind’ Shows The Romantic Disaster Of Misaligned Values

Every so often, I watch episodes of a popular reality TV show, in part because it’s admittedly entertaining but also because it’s a window into contemporary culture. Even if “reality TV” dating shows aren’t fully real life, they’re real enough to reflect prevailing notions of romance, dating, sexual ethics, gender politics, and more.

I recently watched some of Love Is Blind’s newest season on Netflix (its eighth in five years) and found it fascinating as a reflection of our culture’s widening gender divide over politics and as a strong warning against “unequally yoked” dating when key values and spiritual convictions diverge.

‘Experiment’ Mirrors Digital-Age Dating

The show’s “experiment” follows a dozen or so singles as they get to know each other in dating “pods” where they gab with potential mates for hours, with the caveat that they can’t see them. Over 10 days of pod speed-dating sessions, a handful of couples pair off and build intimate connections without physical attraction being a “complicating” factor.

But only when the couple decides to get engaged (again, sight unseen) does the “wall of separation” go away and they’re allowed to see each other in the flesh. Betrothal is thus a sort of carrot dangled in front of the participants: Only if you take this gigantic leap—getting engaged to an unseen person you’ve only known for a few days—can your curiosity about his or her looks be resolved.

The show pitches the “sight unseen” pod-dating concept as proof that committed love can be established on a purely cerebral connection: being attracted to someone’s “heart.” To be sure, plenty of married couples in history first fell in love via disembodied communication like letter-writing. It’s possible. But the show goes out of its way to downplay the importance of embodiment. And in solving for one problem (coupling based only on physical attraction) the series creates another (Gnostic separation between a person’s “true self” and embodied reality).

Love Is Blind is yet another expression of contemporary culture’s Gnostic tendency to construe identity as ethereal with little necessary connection to physical reality. As I’ve written before, this is an unsurprising turn for a digital era defined by the carefully curated virtual presentation of one’s self.

Social media and dating apps allow contemporary singles to increasingly interact first in disembodied ways. The dominance of DMs and texting (which loom large in Love Is Blind) as preferred modes of dating communication illustrate how normalized “mediated intimacy” has become. The expressive freedoms afforded by digitally mediated interactions (to curate, crop, control, and posture in precise ways) means digital natives now take for granted that “the self is an idea that need not be connected to (or ‘confined by’) bodily realities.”

Love Is Blind is yet another expression of contemporary culture’s Gnostic tendency to construe identity as ethereal with little necessary connection to physical reality.

In this world, the Love Is Blind “experiment” isn’t a conceptual stretch. Part of its popularity among younger generations might stem from the fact that it mirrors the social awkwardness and embodiment fears of Gen Z, who sometimes prefer to interact with someone first—and for an extended period—behind the safe buffer of digital distance before introducing the vulnerability of in-person contact.

When the “reveal” comes for engaged Love Is Blind couples, it’s often awkward. In an ironic shift, physical appearance suddenly becomes extremely important. The newly engaged man and woman feel hyperaware of their looks. If it doesn’t go well, they think, Is it because I’m not attractive?

Rather than physical attraction being a normal, natural factor in the relationship from the start, the introduction of it after a couple has committed to one another makes it abruptly the thing that could make or break the relationship. And when some couples inevitably don’t have chemistry, they feel “shallow” for caring about physical attraction. But it’s not wrong to care about attraction as part of the equation. We’re physical beings. A marriage is a one-flesh union, not a one-thoughts union.

Don’t Minimize Value Misalignment

Despite the show’s outlandish premise, each Love Is Blind season typically results in at least one couple getting married (the season finale features the engaged-couple “finalists” holding weddings wherein they either marry or—in most cases—break up at the altar). And astonishingly, most couples who did say “I do” in their season’s finale are still happily married today—perhaps proof that God can forge committed marriages from even the most broken, bizarre circumstances.

Season 8 (spoiler alert) concludes with three breakups at the altar and one couple who marries. The couple who marries—Daniel and Taylor—come from Christian families and seem to be faith-driven themselves. Their values, most importantly their faith, are aligned. They prioritized clarity on this in their many hours of pod-dating discussion.

But of the three couples who said “I don’t” at the altar, two cite political value misalignment as the factor. In a clip that went viral among conservative influencers, Sara Carton left Ben Mezzenga at the altar, saying they weren’t on the same “wavelength” regarding the “values” she holds “close to [her] heart.” Those values centered on LGBT+ pride (Sara’s sister is a lesbian) and Black Lives Matter—and for Sara they essentially amount to a secular orthodoxy. She sees Ben (a churchgoing Christian) as a heretic who pays insufficient fealty to the progressive gods.

A similar situation played out between Virginia Miller and Devin Buckley. Virginia dumped Devin at the altar, also because of political differences. Like Sara, Virginia is passionate about liberal causes like abortion and LGBT+ equality, while Devin (like Ben) leans more conservative Christian.

In both breakups, the men come across as weak for minimizing important differences and (especially in Ben’s case) repeatedly apologizing for his beliefs or his church’s convictions. Ben and Devin reflect a broader trend of men in dating relationships pretending to be more liberal than they are, out of fear their more conservative stances would scare women off (a not-unfounded fear: a recent poll found only 35 percent of women are willing to date across party lines, compared to 52 percent of men). Ben and Devin should have been more honest about the values mismatch, not letting the romance get anywhere near an altar decision.

Better Approach to Dating

Valuing “viewpoint diversity” might work on college campuses and in the pluralistic public square, but it doesn’t often go well in a marriage. Paul’s command “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers” (2 Cor. 6:14, NIV) holds true. Common biblical convictions and spiritual alignment are foundational for a healthy marriage. When Ben and Sara came to an impasse over his desire for her to go to church with him and her desire for him to go to Pride Week with her, it was obvious their relationship was doomed. As I watched the slow train wrecks of Ben/Sara and Devin/Virginia, I kept thinking, This is why singles should meet potential mates in their church. This is why institutions matter.

If church really matters for Ben (as it increasingly does for Gen Z men), he should start his search for a wife there—or maybe in a broader network of churches in his area. He should get to know his pastor and ask him for wisdom on dating (among other categories of sorely needed wisdom). Pro-tip: Communities built around deeply held beliefs are often good pools from which to source a potential mate.

Pro-tip: Communities built around deeply held beliefs are often good pools from which to source a potential mate.

In its spaghetti-thrown-at-the-wall approach, Love Is Blind mirrors the superficial aimlessness of much modern dating. In a largely atomized iWorld where church and other associational memberships are on the wane, singles are free agents navigating the dating pool like a ball navigates a spinning roulette wheel. Finding a good match in the “pods” is about as reliable as swiping through endless options on dating apps—even apps hyper-niched around interest or ethnicity. On occasion, lightning strikes and you find “your person.” But most of the time, it’s a frustrating cycle of short-lived romantic stints because none is grounded in thick, IRL community.

Love Is Blind may occasionally produce lasting marriages (rooting for you, Daniel and Taylor!). But mostly, it’s a cautionary tale about the hazards of dating in the disembodied, de-institutionalized digital age. If you’re single and looking for a spouse, don’t go on a reality show. Don’t turn to apps as your first option. Get plugged into a local church and other embodied communities of shared values and common mission. Start in your existing network of trusted friends and family connections. Don’t set yourself up to be blindsided by value misalignment down the road. Start from a place of clarity on shared values.

Marital love, after all, isn’t usually “blind.” A key ingredient is vision. Shared vision. Alignment. As is often the case, G. K. Chesterton puts it best: “Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.”