“Love Is Blind” Broke Reality TV’s Politics Bubble

Marrisa George and Ramses Prashad vacation in the seventh season of “Love Is Blind.”Netflix courtesy of IMDB.com

Typically, I don’t watch reality television for the politics. After a day spent covering topics like climate misinformation, our crumbling democracy, and the literal death of nature, I watch reality TV to escape politics.

Which is why, last week, I was eager to throw on a pair of sweatpants, pop some corn, melt into my couch, and binge the seventh season of Netflix’s Love Is Blind, cocooned in blankets and romanticist fluff. This was my safe place. At least it was supposed to be.

If you haven’t seen the show, allow me to summarize: Around 30 heterosexual singles sign up to date in individual, single-room “pods” with the aim of getting engaged “sight unseen” after just 10 days. The couples that do get engaged meet face-to-face for the first time in a dramatic, red-carpet reveal. Producers then follow them as they vacation in a tropical locale, return to their jobs, and attempt to date in the “real world” until they split or get married 28 days later. With a few exceptions, most of the couples break up. Love, in fact, is not blind. But it sure as hell is good television.

And like most reality TV shows I watch (and I watch a lot), Love Is Blind normally exists in a political bubble: Aside from one relatively groundbreaking discussion of abortion in season three, any discussions of politics between the couples, if they are filmed at all, are left on the cutting room floor, and the cast members’ political affiliations are left a mystery. (This is your warning: spoilers ahead!)

But in a noticeable deviation from previous seasons, season seven, which takes place in the Washington, DC, area, puts politics front and center. The season includes topics like dating across the aisle, having a change of heart in voting for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, and a whopping, 12-minute dinner-table conversation about religion, Barbie vs. Past Lives, and the role of the United States military in American imperialism. It was, as Time magazine described it, “easily the most substantive conversation Love Is Blind has ever aired.”

The conversation, between Ramses Prashad, a 35-year-old program associate at a justice reform nonprofit, and 32-year-old lawyer and former Navy service member Marissa George, begins in episode seven with the two discussing their wedding plans. Having both grown away from their Christian and Mormon upbringings, they agree to “anything but a cis-hetero” officiant—which in turn leads to a conversation about religion broadly.

After George says she believes in past lives, Prashad says they need to watch Past Lives, referring to the 2023 film starring Greta Lee. George agrees—but only after the two watch the 2023 box-office hit Barbie. “Barbie made me realize I’m not accepting any man who supports [the] patriarchy,” George says. “It took Barbie to make you realize that?” Prashad jokes.

“I was working my way up there. I had to leave the military behind,” George says. “People do not realize the, like, brainwashing that [the] military does.”

Prashad, who grew up in Venezuela, notes the US military has “destabilized entire countries.” He references James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, saying that to love a country is to critique it. George responds that while she doesn’t support “half the shit the military does in other countries,” she supports the individual members within it. “I am proud of my service,” she says. “I support the troops, babe.”

In episode eight, Prashad elaborates, saying that if George were to reenter the military, it would be a deal breaker. “We talk about things like Palestine right now,” he explains to three of George’s friends. “I always stand with people who are under the hammer of US imperialism. I feel for those people and so it’s hard for me to see myself in the future with someone who is actively involved in the military.”

As someone who has dated across the aisle, this sort of discussion felt authentic—and refreshing. It’s not often producers let social commentary slip into the final cut, let alone devote more than a few minutes to it.

Take ABC’s Bachelor franchise, where conversations about religion or politics primarily occur in the “fantasy suites”—the only time the contestants aren’t filmed: In Season 16 of The Bachelorette, which aired in 2020, for instance, Tayshia Adams reportedly ends her relationship with contestant Ivan Hall due to religious differences discussed behind closed doors. (ABC did air a conversation between the two about Black Lives Matter, but only after the franchise was criticized for having a race problem. More on reality TV’s botched attempts to diversify here.)

Two seasons earlier, after Huffington Post first reported that Bachelorette finalist Garrett Yrigoyen had liked transphobic memes, and memes mocking “leftist women” and immigrants, he apologized on-air, without addressing specifics. “Some stuff came out about my social media,” he said on the live, After the Final Rose special, “and I didn’t realize the effect behind a double-tap or a like on Instagram…I didn’t mean to hurt anybody’s feelings or do anything like that.”

On the most recent season of Love Island USA, the only conversation I can recall that remotely references a world outside the islander’s plush, colorful villa is when 22-year-old contestant Kaylor Martin asks, after seeing her UK-based love interest, Aaron Evans, in short shorts, “The UK isn’t Europe, right?“

To be sure, Love Is Blind doesn’t deserve any major awards for airing a conversation about the military. As Time put it, “The conversation doesn’t settle their conflict, which they continue to hash out in subsequent episodes.” (I flipped through the newest episodes, which aired Wednesday—things aren’t looking good for Ramses and Marissa.) “Nor does it have the specificity or factual rigor to genuinely educate viewers on the issue at hand.” And it certainly doesn’t excuse legitimate criticisms of the show, like its platforming of outdated beauty standards and allegedly exploitative labor practices.

But the plotline does inch reality TV closer to an acknowledgment that relationships, love, and marriage are political. Whatever promise of neutrality drew me to Love Is Blind in the first place is broken, my safe space momentarily disrupted. And you know what? I’m okay with that, because reality television is a little more real for it.