Like many others who find themselves consumed with stress about schoolwork and an ongoing global pandemic, in recent weeks I have turned to Netflix to pass the hours and forget about the world. And like many others, I have succumbed to the pressure and watched the new Netflix reality show “Love is Blind.” “Love is Blind” is a marriage game show (reminiscent of “The Bachelor”) that has grown enormously popular over the past month for its absurd depiction of romance in the 21st-century. But besides the spectacular and superficial nature of the relationships depicted, the show also idealizes heteronormative norms surrounding love, masculinity, and marriage.

The premise of the show is quite simple. For the first few episodes, single men and women have dates in the hopes of finding the love of their life. To ensure that the couples develop a purely emotional and intellectual connection (instead of a physical one), there’s a catch: all of the dates happen in pods where the two people are separated by a screen that prevents them from seeing each other. All of the men live together and can interact face-to-face, as can the women, but the men and women remain physically separated to test the hypothesis that “love is blind” (yes, this implies that all of the potential couples on the show are straight). After a couple of episode’s worth of dates in “the pods,” the couples, who purport to have found true love, get engaged without ever having seen each other. The remaining three quarters of the show follows the couples after they meet as they prepare for the wedding, most of them unsure if they will go through with it.

Throughout the show, heteronormativity and gender norms permeate the characters’ dialogue. As the women look for wedding dresses in episode 8, Lauren and her mother talk about how searching for Lauren’s wedding dress is something that they’ve both thought about for years. “Every little girl always has this fantasy about the day that she goes to pick her wedding dress,” Lauren says. Minutes later, as the guys are picking out their suits, Mark explains that he feels “kind of scrambled,” since guys “never really put much thought into” the details of their wedding. These scenes play up certain heteronormative and even plainly sexist conceptions about how romantic love and its traditional symbols figure into the lives of men and women. Marriage is just another step in the road of a man’s life, and as such, Mark has never had to give much thought about the details about what marriage might look like. For women like Lauren, however, marriage is a central event that one plans one’s life around. Through performance and dialogue, the show normalizes and reinforces this gendered ideal that feels a bit archaic.

In a piece published in The Independent, Annie Lord writes that those on the show who are “unable to assimilate into this model of heterosexual love are punished.” She points to scenes in which characters are shown grappling with the sacrifices that come with marriage: Lauren struggles with leaving her apartment behind to move in with Cameron, for example, and Diamond and Carlton argue about Carlton’s bisexuality.

Early in the show, Carlton decides to wait until after his engagement to tell Diamond about his past history of “dating both genders” (Carlton never actually describes himself as ‘bisexual’). Carlton explains that revealing his sexuality to Diamond would lead to too many questions and would cause Diamond to doubt the strong connection they establish. But when Carlton comes out to Diamond in episode 3 (days after proposing to her), it’s clear that his deviation from the norm of masculine heterosexuality is a ripple in the broader heterosexual matrix that American society places great cultural stock in. That is, deviation from gendered and sexual norms are seen not just as abnormalities and deviations, but also as attacks upon longstanding cultural values and traditions. For example, Carlton’s bisexuality seems to unsettle Diamond’s conception of what their married life might look like, as she wonders whether there’s a chance Carlton will want to cheat on her with a male-partner after they get married. As Carlton calls out Diamond’s thinly-veiled homophobia and as Diamond questions Carlton for not coming out before their engagement, the argument breaks down and the couple splits.

One dynamic that I think has been under-discussed is the age difference between the characters Mark and Jessica. Mark is 24 years old, energetic, and naïve. Jessica, the show’s villain, is 34 years old and clearly has no intention of marrying Mark, as she picks him only after being rejected by her main love interest earlier in the show. As Mark and Jessica’s relationship progresses, Jessica repeatedly cites their age gap as a source of doubt. She says that Mark should be finding himself, focusing on his career, and having fun as a 24-year-old. On the flip side, Jessica is portrayed as someone who needs to get married and settle down soon, given that she is in her mid-30s. In playing up Jessica’s age, the producers rely on the popular sentiment that women who aren’t married by their mid-30s are running out of time to carry out their biological duty of reproduction. Moreover, Mark and Jessica’s age difference is an obvious source of tension for the couple, as they frequently talk about what their friends and family might think about the age gap (though I imagine that if the genders were swapped and the man was the older partner, the age gap would be seen as much less important). This dynamic leads me to think more broadly about the range of norms and expectations that govern heterosexual life narratives. One’s early/mid-20s are a time for (self-) exploration and fun, but one should be settled down with a family by one’s mid-30s. I feel that these normative life narratives are almost ubiquitous. Any time I have considered personal and career choices (e.g., not seriously entertaining the thought of marriage until my late 20s, or thinking about pursuing graduate school – a nearly decade-long process) that might violate predominant heterosexual life narratives, I have often been met with intense scrutiny from my parents, who want me to have settled into a career and a marriage by age 30. Mark and Jessica’s dynamic suggests that even heterosexual relationships that involve crossing different parts of the heterosexual life narrative should be scrutinized and viewed suspiciously.

“Love is Blind” is not a very good show. For what it’s worth, I think it’s mostly scripted. But the show’s cringe-worthy depictions of romantic love, if viewed with a critical eye, can incite us to think about the ways that heterosexual life narratives, norms, and expectations inform popular culture and structure our very own lives.

 

by Bilal Rehman

 

References:

Anna Ross. “Love is not blind, it’s broken: The Netflix show’s extreme form of heterosexuality is toxic,” in The Independent. Accessed 29 March 2020. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/love-is-blind-netflix-show-series-review-toxic-heterosexuality-vanessa-jessica-barnett-giannina-a9376436.html

“Love is Blind.” Netflix.