Love is Blind. So are Teenage Girls.

My thoughts about love, recorded before I had a frontal lobe.

I was trying to explain to someone…okay, it was to my husband…why I am so hooked on watching the Netflix reality series “Love is Blind.” And in trying to explain my attraction to this show, which I swallow whole without even chewing, I had to somehow explain it to myself.

It’s hard to say why I care if two incredibly attractive, publicity-chasing egomaniacs can sustain the appearance of a bond in front of the camera for a period of 37 days of proclaiming that this person who they met, without ever seeing, is someone they want to be with forever. I guess I am hoping to get a glimpse into what constitutes ‘love’ for genetically exceptional people who think that getting married to a complete stranger is a small price to pay for the fame, and endorsement deals that will follow. (Author’s note: I understand that the ‘people’ on reality shows are not really “people” as we know them. Yet statistically I have read that we share as much DNA with them as we do with the chimpanzee and the fruit fly.)

I think the reason ‘Love is Blind’ hooked me so hard, so instantly, is that it offers a pop cultural x-ray of a certain kind of twenty-something single that I never meet socially. They are a specific type. Quite a few of them identify their occupation as “content creator” “brand ambassador” “media assistant” or “project manager.” All of them are the kind of person who wants to be on a reality show.

The way the show works is that each season a racially diverse bloat of uniformly attractive singles meet each other inside a structure that the show calls “the pods.” These are little T.V. studio/airport-lounge looking cubicles where everyone can get comfy while they interview members of the opposite sex, one at a time, who they can hear but cannot see. At this point, they are separated from each other by a wall.

Aerial view of The Pods.

The conceit of the show (which they would like us to call ‘The Experiment’) is that all of the singles are here because they are fed up with the superficiality of traditional dating. They just want to get down to the important business of finding someone to marry while 1.5 million people watch them do it. As the interviews proceed, the participants often go on and on about how this is the deepest, most meaningful, most intimate connection they have ever made with anyone ever.

The way the show is structured is that there are between 10 and 13 episodes in a season and by episode 3, most of the participants have eagerly leapt in to an official engagement to someone behind a wall who they have not yet seen. Only after they have made this enormous commitment are they allowed to meet wall-free. And as you might expect, this first meeting is a big moment. Usually, they both rush forward to hug each other. Often, the man hugs the woman so hard that he lifts her off the ground. Then one minute later, he gets down on one knee and presents her with a little velvet box containing a ring. Since all of the cast members have been pre-approved by a consortium of Netflix executives at least partially because they are very attractive, they are usually dazzled by each other. Occasionally, however, there is no attraction, which can also be good for the drama of upcoming plot lines. The rest of the season is a ramp up to a wedding ceremony, where we will watch the couple decide, on camera, surrounded by the trappings of a formal wedding that contains all the requisite costumes, rituals, gathered family flown in from everywhere and a formally dressed generic religious figure, whether they are actually willing to take a vow of ‘forever’ to a person they barely know. (And yes, some of them back out.)

Speaking as someone who waited 22 years after meeting a suitable mate before deciding to get married, I watch this show like a wide-eyed cultural anthropologist. I am Margaret Meade, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible while making notes about what the Trobriand Islanders believe constitutes love. Having been raised in a family where love appeared to be nothing if not conditional, marital love has always loomed as a confusing concept. After all, hasn’t real life shown us that statistically speaking what fifty to sixty percent of us believe to be the kind of love that is perfect for a marriage will only last a few years before the onset of frightening acrimony?

But these kinds of provable negative prophesies do not slow down the participants in ‘Love is Blind’ as they rush into what they feel is overwhelming love based on the flimsiest evidence of any kind of “chemistry”. For some , all that is required to make a commitment of forever is a mutual passion for a certain sports team, a shared love of deep dish pizza and a willingness to dance. Next thing you know, there they are, talking to camera, telling us that they feel as though they have found more intimacy under these circumstances than in all the other situations they have experienced where cameras were not a factor. They are so bowled over by their ease in communicating with each other this way that promising forever does not seem unreasonable.

As a cynical, judgmental adult with a lot of life experience, it is impossible for me to imagine myself as a contestant, playing along with the rules of this show. For one thing, the faces I would be making would keep stopping the action cold. ‘Who are these people who are willing to buy into this premise?’ I keep asking myself. And I had no idea how they had developed in this way until…until…until it occurred to me that I was in denial. Something was coming into focus. The behavior was suddenly familiar. Because there was a time in my life when I would have been a perfect contestant for this show. And that was when I was fifteen years old and falling in love for the first time, without benefit of a frontal lobe. The frontal lobe of the human brain does not fully connect to the rest of the brain until we are around 26. It’s no coincidence that quite a few of the contestants on ‘Love is Blind’ are in their early twenties.

Which is why I now present, for your interest and amusement, my own personal version of ‘Love is Blind’, ripped directly from the pages of my high school diary. It is packed with detail but containing so little insight into the behavior of those for whom I felt love, that I might as well have been blind.

NOTE: A little set up: When I was in 9th grade, my family moved from Florida to California. To say that I was not in favor of this move is to understate. Socially speaking, back in Florida I had been a made-man. The last thing I wanted was to start finding my way into a new pre-existing social structure. In the following panels, the white areas are the direct diary quotes. The version of me that wrote this diary is the only version of me that could have been a contestant on ‘Love is Blind.’ Thank God the show was decades and decades away. I am eternally grateful that I was never available to be recruited for any reality television shows during this extra loopy period.

I am continuously grateful that social media and reality shows were decades away from my ability to get closer to them when I might have been dumb enough to try.

By the way: if you are interested in more stories like this, may I recommend my last book. It is called ‘We Saw Scenery’ and this story was a re-calibration of part of that book. It’s still for sale most places. It got good reviews. A lot of people liked it. Here is a link to a video of me trying to be sell it. That is all.