what lovers cannot see

On their first date together in the pods, Tim confides in Alex that his two older sisters passed away in recent years. Through the wall on a later date, the warmth in his voice is audible as he describes his romantic fantasy. “I’ll get to give my parents one more daughter,” Tim says to Alex as she sits on the floor, tears streaming down her face and onto her notebook. Before the couple meets in person, Tim gifts Alex a bracelet belonging to one of his sisters: a gesture so heartfelt, so meaningful, and so manipulative that Alex can’t help but see this relationship through.

Of course, Tim and Alex’s relationship, as in the case of the overwhelming majority of couples on Netflix’s Love is Blind, does not work out. Tim holds fast to his “little brother energy,” tiring Alex; Alex fails to integrate into the role of daughter-in-law with proper enthusiasm, devastating Tim. I can’t say that this predictable outcome provided any satisfaction, but it did an exemplary job of showing that projection in dating is insufficient at best, and at its worst, it can be dangerous.

Love is Blind loyalists know that not every participant walks onto set with a clean bill of mental health. Still, season after season, I watch as young singles embark on supine soliloquies aimed at complete strangers, and it becomes clearer that I'm simply watching the made-for-TV version of a psychoanalyst's office. With their artificial lighting, the fake velvet sofas, the nightmarish color palette, and is that... a box of tissues? these first dates often resemble intake assessments with a new therapist. What, exactly, brought you here today?

Once I saw it, it was impossible to unsee: every conversation radiated with Freudian theory, from transference-love to the Oedipus complex. This season, I sat aghast as the parallels continued to stack, and by the time the couples shipped off to Honduras, I was certain that the "experiment" was not a test of whether love was blind, but something else entirely.

We’ve seen transference play out in popular media, like the iconic relationship between Tony Soprano and Dr. Melfi, but in reality, it’s happening all the time. Simply put, transference is the misdirection of emotions towards one’s therapist, but it happens in all manner of dyads: a bad first impression of someone who looks like your ex, or an obsession with a boss who validates you in ways your mother never did. To project is human, but to act on it borders on pathological.

Love is Blind is useless as an experiment in values-based dating, but it is revelatory on the subject of human pathology. As a psychological experiment, I’m sure it would never pass the APA’s code of ethics. (They may be consenting adults, but they are also drunk all the time.) Luckily, as a relational exercise couched in a series on Netflix - a platform who continues to pump out new seasons despite the many controversies - morality is an afterthought. And that’s clear enough from the contestants, who approach actual politics with the hesitation of someone who has been asked to kill a cockroach with their bare hands.

Rather than physical appearance, contestants on Love is Blind seem to fall in love based on how the other person receives sensitive information: deaths in the family, struggles with past relationships, and of course, the plight of being too wealthy or too hot to date in the real world. As they lie on those Wayfair couches and recount their childhood trauma while staring at the ceiling or the glowing plastic wall, I like to picture Freud himself on the other side, analyzing their unconscious motivations.

The original phrase, from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, is about lacking critical thinking in matters of love. Hm!

In a society ostensibly starved for real connection, trauma-dumping feels like a fast track to forging a relationship from nothing. When anyone listens to us without judgment (as mental-health professionals are paid to do), we’re prone to developing a fondness for them. From the random girl who comforted you in the bar bathroom to the AI bot who responded to your confessionals with words it algorithmically knew you wanted to hear, these projection-objects of affection only function in a vacuum. Taken from the pods, for example, these relationships are readily tainted by messy apartments, or cellulite, or, god forbid, conversations about politics.

If you’re sick of rooting for couples whose uniting cause is a shared passion for Christmas (That’s literally it. They just love to celebrate Christmas.), try watching the next season of Love is Blind through a different analytical lens. You might find it more entertaining to witness the ways these boring people bare their thinly-sheathed psyches for the world to see. Maybe you’ll even realize any hope for the possibility of appearance-blind dating was simply a projection of your own.