2 breakups mirror a real-life chasm : NPR

We’ve discussed Netflix’s Love Is Blind on Pop Culture Happy Hour a couple of times before, and the very obvious primary conclusion we always land upon is this: The “social experiment” the reality dating show relentlessly purports to be about — “Is love truly … blind?” — is not actually what the show is about.

But just because the show fails spectacularly at its own premise, doesn’t mean it’s not exposing other facets of the human condition. The most recent season, set in Minneapolis, might have featured the blandest cohort yet; the juiciest on-screen drama producers could muster was David Bettenburg’s maddening self-sabotage in his relationship with Lauren O’Brien. What Season 8 lacked in fireworks, however, it (almost) made up for in the ways the show so clearly paralleled a dating phenomenon playing out IRL: Two of the women who dumped their respective fiancés at the altar cited the men’s inability to engage meaningfully with political issues that were important to their partners.

For Sara Carton and Ben Mezzenga, the misalignment of values was clear when they were still dating in “the pods.” When she brought up her interest in social justice — particularly the Black Lives Matter movement and George Floyd, whose murder took place right in their home city — his response was, “I’ve just kind of been staying out of it.” While this clearly bothered her, that fire-engine red flag wasn’t enough to send Carton running in the opposite direction immediately; they got engaged anyway. And predictably, the flags kept coming: Mezzenga said during the season that his church “seemed like they’re open” to LGBTQ people, but from what Carton could see, that openness only went so far — the church seemed to love queer people only in spite of their queerness. And when Carton questioned him about it, he claimed to not actually know his congregation’s stance – though he half-heartedly maintained that his own views were similar to Carton’s.

Being blissfully “unaware” of — or really, actively disinterested in — basic human rights was also Devin Buckley’s MO — he’s the basketball bro who (unrelatedly) strongly resembles Keegan-Michael Key, but with hair. In one of the later episodes, his fiancé Virginia Miller likewise tried to get him to talk about where he stands on issues like abortion, and he hemmed, hawed, and ultimately refused to take a position. He too claimed neutrality, though, he said, his family tends to vote conservative. (And while dating in the pods, his reaction to another participant’s disclosure that she’d dated women in the past was … more awkward than chill.)

Such fence-sitting ultimately doomed both relationships. “I will be really clear about [my views],” said Miller, during last Sunday’s reunion special. “I 100% support the LGBTQ community. I also believe that women should have the decision to choose if they want to have an abortion or not. I also believe that different religions should be valued.”

Some observations jump out. For one, Love Is Blind‘s inherently conservative aim to speed-date participants into cis-het marriage is finally butting up against the real world, where young women tend to be more liberal than the young men they might date. Season 8 was reportedly filmed about a year ago, prior to the 2024 election, but this gap in political views was already a deal-breaker for women on the show. Watching the season now, at a time when reproductive rights have been eroding for years, federal policies are upending the lives of trans people, and the federal government is arresting people with no criminal record — the political chasm between cast members felt unmistakable.

This kind of fission has come up previously; in Season 7, for instance, Ramses Prashad took issue with Marissa George not wanting to go on birth control medication, and expressed reluctance to wear a condom. But I can’t recall the dissolution of a Love Is Blind relationship being so expressly tied to political division as it was in Season 8, as opposed to, say, one of the partners just getting “the ick.”

It’s also notable that during the reunion, Sara Carton suggested it was Ben Mezzenga’s unwillingness to merely discuss politics that led her to end the relationship — more than his actual political views, whatever they are. “Out of the pods, it just never progressed,” Carton said of Mezzenga. “It felt like there was a lack of curiosity from Ben’s side, and that bothered me.”

Reality TV wasn’t built to accommodate nuanced conversations about social issues, and watching Carton and Miller try desperately to be open-minded while their partners gave them Dua Lipa-levels of nothing to work with only confirms this. But despite, or maybe because of, Netflix’s editing choices and/or some cast members’ reticence to divulge — what goes unspoken or merely alluded to often tells keen-eyed viewers a lot anyway. Namely that everything is politics, whether we choose to act like it or not.

The quiet part was made exceptionally loud when co-host Nick Lachey asked Mezzenga during the reunion if he’d deliberately refused to acknowledge his church’s stance on LGBTQ rights. “It was honestly that I didn’t remember because I didn’t ever need to know. Because there wasn’t really anyone in my life that it really pertained to,” Mezzenga responded before adding defensively, “… and I’m not proud of it.”

Indeed.

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

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