‘Love Is Blind’ and the Atomization of Finding a Mate

“Over the next ten days, you all will have the opportunity to fall in love based solely on who you are on the inside,” announces Love Is Blind co-host Nick Lachey at the opening of the Netflix reality show’s latest season. For the sixth time, thirty singles from an American metropolis filed into a series of dating “pods” to begin their search for a spouse “sight unseen.”

While the premise of the show is that contestants are forced to discount physical appearance in the quest for a lifelong partner, the radical and emblematic nature of Love Is Blind has little to do with looks.

The truly unique element of the show is not that contestants must become engaged without ever having laid eyes on their fiancé, but that they must do so without the guidance of the social influences that have governed human mating behavior for all of history. The men and women on Love Is Blind must therefore decide to propose or accept a proposal completely individually, with no public or community input on their partner, whom they will have chosen from a pool of total strangers.

In this regard, the dating app age has made the Love Is Blind experience universal.

Read “Love Originates in Shared Suffering and Pity”

Larger Dating Pool, Fewer Second Opinions

Since the turn of the millennium, all traditional forms of encountering a romantic prospect have been overtaken by the skyrocketing use of online dating. It is now the number one way that heterosexual couples meet in the US, with more couples meeting online than through friends, family, or work combined. 

Online dating drastically enlarges a user’s dating pool, giving them access to an unprecedented number of other singles and introducing them to, as Love Is Blind participants often remark of their own reality TV romances, people they would have never otherwise met. Dating apps remove many of the barriers that shape traditional dating pools (such as friend groups, workplaces, educational institutions, and places of worship), opening the door for users to consider a broader range of potential mates.

In another parallel to Love Is Blind, dates who meet online are initially total strangers and embark on the courtship process on a one-to-one basis, only integrating their respective social circles at a later stage. One of the conditions of Love Is Blind is that, while in the pods, contestants are completely isolated from the outside world. While participants do receive input on their potential fiancés from their same-sex contestants (a fact which played a critical role in the Season 6 love triangle between Amber, AD, and Matthew) it is markedly different from the kind of feedback they would elicit from real-life friends and family.

All participants are strangers prior to filming (with Season 5 providing a rare and controversial exception) and generally have little bearing on each other’s lives after the show. Furthermore, fiancés only meet each other’s friends and families after having already become engaged and gone on a honeymoon.

Offscreen, opinions on the appropriate length of time to wait before introducing a new partner to friends or parents vary widely, with 52% of respondents to a YouGov poll reporting that couples should wait between 1 and 6 months to meet each other’s families.

The defining features of the dating app/Love Is Blind model of finding a relationship can therefore be considered first, the practice of selecting a partner from a relatively random pool of strangers, and second, the exclusion of family and community input until the relationship has already been established. In these ways, this paradigm marks a dramatic departure from how marriages have historically begun. 

Prior to the explosion of online dating, most couples met, as described by economic historian Marc Goñi, “in settings where entry is restricted to similar others” (such as a friend group, workplace, educational institution, or place of worship). In 1995, the most common ways that heterosexual US couples met were through friends (33%), work (19%), a bar or restaurant (19%), or family (15%).

This means that, in the vast majority of relationships, a person’s partner would have belonged to the same social, professional, or geographic community as them, and potentially would have already been acquainted with their friends or family before courtship began. Both Love Is Blind and online dating subvert this pattern by atomizing the process of finding a partner.

Read “All the Lonely People: The Atomized Generation”

‘The Privatization of Dating’

Writer Donna Ferguson describes this phenomenon as “the privatization of dating,” wherein the search for a romantic relationship has become “a private, compartmentalized activity that is deliberately carried out. . . in an entirely disconnected, separate social sphere.” This change in dating behavior reflects broader trends in the atomization of American society, a phenomenon in which people become disconnected and dissociated from those around them, living their lives as individual or household units as opposed to members of wider communities.

The atomization of American life can be demonstrated by various indicators, such as the fact that 57% of Americans know “only some” of their neighbors, while 23% under the age of 30 know none at all. Additionally, 1 in 5 US adults live over an hour away from any of their family members.

In a fitting metaphor, the physical format of Love Is Blind’s pods echoes the increasingly isolated structure of American society, which has produced rising loneliness and falling trust. Undeniably, the ways in which we relate to one another, both romantically and otherwise, are undergoing a significant transition, but what are the social and personal implications?

Read “Trust in an Age of Reactionaries and Revolutionaries”

Technology-Driven Dating Isn’t All Bad

This technologically driven shift in marriage and dating behavior across America could have positive ramifications for society, however.

The practice of meeting your marriage partner “in settings where entry is restricted to similar others” restricts opportunities to marry across social and economic lines. This facilitates assortative mating, wherein people select partners who resemble themselves in terms of background or status. Assortative mating perpetuates the pooling of resources within social strata, reproducing hierarchies.

The propensity of online dating to create more diverse couples than other avenues of introduction could lead to greater social integration and more equal wealth distribution. US couples who met online are more likely to be “of different college degree status,” an important marker of economic status, as well as interracial and interreligious.

A similar effect has also been observed in Canada.

However, the American study noted that “only a small part of the recent changes in couple diversity can be directly attributed to couples meeting online,” signifying that broader social trends may be at play. This aligns with other findings that, although couples who met through online dating are more likely to belong to different ethnicities or political parties than those who met offline, this effect largely disappears when controlling for age.

Younger people are simply more likely to both date online and pursue more diverse pairings.

Read “Can Social Technologists Solve the Atomization Problem?“

Who Has the More Satisfying Relationships?

Regarding how couples who met online differ from those who did not, an article published in Computers in Human Behavior reports that the former have slightly “less satisfying and stable marriages” than their offline counterparts.

The study’s authors tie this finding to factors such as geographic distance and others’ disapproval of their union. Furthermore, a study conducted in the UK found that married couples who met online were six times more likely to divorce within the first three years of marriage than those who met through other avenues.

Researchers suggested that this might be because “gathering reliable information about the long-term character of the person you are dating or marrying is quite obviously more difficult for couples who meet online without input from mutual friends or family or other community,” a challenge that Love Is Blind’s contestants are intimately familiar with.

However, this effect leveled off after three years of marriage, affirming researchers’ proposition that this demonstrates “the importance of social capital established over the long term through families and friendships and communities.” Concerning the success rate of Love Is Blind, of the 25 couples that have gotten engaged across the show’s first five seasons, ten made it past the altar and eight continue to be married to this day.

It is the exclusion of social capital in both meeting and courting, not the masking of faces and bodies, which is the truly novel basis of Love Is Blind, and the ingredient of dating apps which has the potential to transform the modern dating world.

Growing social atomization has resulted in a society where a substantial portion of people live as solitary units and date as strangers. The show’s true blindness is therefore that the outrageousness of its premise disguises far more familiar conditions: that our romantic choices have taken on a new level of individualism as the communal forces that have traditionally shaped our lives have been eroded.

For better or for worse.