Why 'Love Is Blind' Represents Everything Wrong With How Our Society Approaches Love And Marriage

There's an uncomfortable scene in season three of "Love Is Blind" when Bartise is meeting his fiancé Nancy's family for the first time. The couple got engaged in the pods (a bunch of separate little rooms where the participants date each other "sight unseen" for a couple weeks before they either get engaged or move on) and only saw and met each other after they fell in love and agreed to get married. Nancy's brothers are grilling Bartise about his intentions and how he feels about their beloved sister. One of them asks if he would still love Nancy if she were to gain 300 pounds during their marriage. Bartise hesitates awkwardly and fumbles around with his answer, and adds that he would hopefully encourage the both of them to exercise together if he felt like she was going down that road. It clearly wasn't a satisfactory answer for her brothers. You can't help but cringe and look away from the TV due to secondhand embarrassment.

This interaction points to the core of "Love Is Blind" that represents why our society gets love and marriage so wrong: the show is built on the false premise that you can successfully separate the physical from the mental and the emotional. We'll unpack this in more detail below, but it's just one of the many ways that the show misrepresents love and marriage. I know the experiment is meant to counter the shallow, superficial foundation upon which most reality dating TV shows are built, but the longterm marriage rate for couples who did get hitched is under 7%. Although it may be entertaining to watch, there are many things the show gets wrong about love, perfectly representing everything our society gets wrong about marriage.

The Physical Is Inseparable From the Mental and Emotional

Dating shows like "The Bachelor" admittedly focus on the shallow parts of dating, like how someone looks and the sexual chemistry you have with them. "Love Is Blind" attempts to take things deeper and help people fall in love with who the person is rather than just their appearance. However, the premise of the show highlights something our modern society has tried to teach us for a while now—that your physical appearance is separate from your mental and emotional health, and in many cases your physical appearance actually has nothing to do whatsoever with your mental and emotional experiences.

The modern notion that you can completely separate your physical appearance from your mental and emotional state is absurd.

The fat acceptance movement is the perfect example. It's been shoved down our throat for years that just because someone is 40 pounds overweight and looks obese doesn't mean they're unhealthy. This is the exact line fed to us by media companies, Hollywood, and social media. "Your looks have nothing to do with your health!" This is absolutely ludicrous. It's only very recently in modern society that this notion was even introduced. For countless generations before us, humans have always understood that your physical and mental/emotional are inseparable. The way you look is a pretty good representation of your internal health and your mental wellness. That's why you can tell when someone is a drug addict, smoker, alcoholic, unhealthy eater, a glutton, etc. What we put into our body shows up on our skin, our dress size, and even how shiny our hair looks. Even more importantly, how we manage our mental and emotional health is directly correlated with how we look and present ourselves to the world. Mentally stable people who have healthy relationships with the people in their life look happier and act kinder to others compared to those who are living in bitterness, anger, and resentment.

Even the transgender movement is reflective of the modern idea that your physical experience isn't at all connected to your mental and emotional experiences. People are actually convinced that just because you look like a man and have all the physical (and biological) characteristics of a man, doesn't necessarily mean you are a man, especially if you don't feel like you're a man mentally and emotionally. I don't think I need to explain how positively ridiculous this concept is.

The modern notion that you can completely separate your physical appearance from your mental and emotional state is absurd, which is why it's a terrible idea to try and convince people that successfully falling in love and getting married can be done without ever seeing or meeting someone and interacting with them physically (I don't mean engaging sexually). The way someone presents themselves physically to the world says a lot about how they value and respect themselves and what their lifestyle is.

It's unfortunate that I even have to clarify this, but by no means am I saying that looks are everything, because that would also point to the idea that the physical is separable from the mental and emotional. The way someone looks isn't everything, but it certainly is a very important part of who they are, the way you interact with them, and whether you're compatible. No wonder "Love Is Blind" has such a low marriage success rate. It's impossible to fall in love with someone and actually build a life together after just a few days of talking to each other from separate rooms and never seeing each other.

Marriage Is Much More Than a Private, Personal Matter

Marriage used to be a commitment that included the joining of two families. You weren't only marrying the person you loved, but you were marrying into that person's family and as a result extending your own family. But the new modern take on marriage is that it's a completely private, personal matter that has nothing to do with anything or anyone else. This is by definition not how marriage works. The couples in "Love Is Blind" met and got engaged in the pods, without any influence from or discussion with their family and friends. When they're released into the real world, they have to play catch up with their loved ones by introducing them to their fiancé and crossing their fingers that they get along and don't have any major disruptions before the wedding.

Marriage used to be a commitment that included the joining of two families.

A successful marriage recognizes that the union is much more sacred than dating or cohabitating. It's about uniting families, creating a new family of your own, and contributing to (and presenting yourselves to) society as a well-functioning unit. This is the traditional way to approach marriage, and it's arguably the most successful way as well. Human beings are social animals that don't exist within a vacuum, which is why it's futile to try and approach the most important decision in your life—who you're going to marry—in an isolated, private setting. Of course it matters how your future husband or wife interacts with your family and friends. It should matter that they get along if you can imagine a blended life that includes everyone.

The modern take on marriage is one of the many reasons so many marriages end in divorce. Marriage is approached in a selfish way. We're told that our husband or wife is supposed to make us happy and fulfilled, and that's really where the buck stops. But whether we like it or not, you function publicly in your family and in society as a married couple, so it's impossible to successfully approach marriage in an isolated, hyper-personalized way. By definition, your marriage is recognized by the state, which is why you're given tax breaks as a married couple. The whole point of getting married is not only to create a loving family, but also to deliver something unified and unique to society. The idea that you can get engaged to someone and then just expect your family to follow along is silly.

Marriage is approached in a selfish way.

It's no wonder Bartise had such a hard time connecting with Nancy's family, and the moment when (spoiler alert!) he denied Nancy at the altar and her brother and mother came to speak to him about it, he raised his voice and said, "This has nothing to do with you!" That's where he's wrong. It most certainly does have something to do with them when he rejected their sister and daughter at the altar, because she is a pillar of their family that he was about to marry into. That moment of the finale was the perfect representation of how modern dating culture has gotten it wrong about marriage. Wedding someone is about so much more than your personal, private feelings—it's also about joining families together and choosing to present yourselves to the public as a unit.

*Real* Challenges Make Married Couples Stronger

When the couples get engaged and leave the pods, they live together for a few weeks and meet each other's families and friends. The purpose of this segment of the show is to find out if they can successfully face challenges and obstacles together. But our generation is so spoiled and privileged, they actually think that arguing with your new fiancé about whether you find someone else attractive (like Cole telling his fiancé, Zanab, that he thinks Colleen is a 10 out of 10 and would have approached her in the real world) or having your fiancé meet your Nigerian mother is a big obstacle in their relationship.

After the couples left the pods and attempted to resume normal life with each other for the first time, there was a lot of talk about how they felt stronger than ever because they faced challenges together for the first time. This was a particularly strong narrative with the couple Matt and Colleen, one of the two couples who actually got married in the end. They had an argument early on in the season when all the couples were staying at a resort together and Cole and Colleen admitted to each other that they found one another attractive and would have approached each other if they met at a bar. An argument ensued between Colleen and Matt that night; Matt felt betrayed and disrespected (rightfully so) and he even said at one point that he couldn't imagine marrying this woman anymore. They talked it out that night and mended things by the following morning.

During the remaining episodes of the season, Matt and Colleen constantly spoke about how that was a huge obstacle they had to overcome and their relationship was stronger for it. While this is certainly a moment that could bring a couple closer, it's a little sad that our generation sees this moment as a huge challenge in a relationship. This couple is going to be in for a massive shock when real challenges fall in their lap during their marriage, like a family member being terminally ill, one of them getting laid off, one of them getting into a dangerous car accident, etc. Our generation has become so coddled and privileged that we really think a couple fighting about finding another person attractive is this huge obstacle that is going to forever define their relationship and equip them for marriage.

This is perfectly reflective of how privileged the younger generations are. A few short generations ago, young couples went through war and famine. They communicated through handwritten letters for months while the husband was on the battlefield. They let themselves go hungry so they could feed their children. And today we think a couple is going to stand the tests of time because they bickered about someone else being hot. This doesn't mean that a couple has to go through something tragic in order to last longterm, but a married couple like Colleen and Matt are both in for a big shock if they think that a small argument about an incident at a bar is going to be their biggest test of love.

Closing Thoughts

People will say that "Love Is Blind" is nothing more than a silly reality dating show and it doesn't deserve such in-depth critique. But the reality is it's a perfect reflection of the way modern American culture approaches love and marriage, and that's perhaps why marriage is more unpopular than ever and divorce rates are so high.