Love may be blind, but politics has X-ray vision.
That’s the supposed takeaway from Netflix’s dating show Love is Blind, whose eighth season ended this month with a jolt of politics: At climactic wedding ceremonies, two liberal women ditched their fiances on the grounds that their values didn’t match. “I’ve always wanted a partner to be on the same wavelength,” one woman said, tears dripping down her face toward her wedding gown. “And so today I can’t.”
Though the season was filmed a year ago, its portrait of young singles in political crisis felt like a reflection, or maybe a prediction, of gender dynamics in politics today. Women 18-29 overwhelmingly favored Kamala Harris over Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential race. Young men made up a vocal portion of Trump’s support. These days, as the online manosphere cheers for Trump’s flood-the-zone tactics, we’re no closer to bridging that divide.
The show also felt like a microcosm of a deeper challenge that has grown exponentially in the past few years. Politics are now an identity, a tribe, a proxy for values. And those fissures are playing out in our romantic lives. A 2020 study by the Institute for Family Studies found that only 21 percent of marriages today are politically mixed — a sizable drop from four years prior — and only 4 percent are unions of registered Democrats and registered Republicans.
That would explain the Love is Blind social media chatter, as fans rallied behind the contestants who matched their tribal identities. There were snarky comments about MAGA men, withering complaints about “radical leftist” women, lamentations that political differences make a relationship impossible. “Never date a liberal girl again,” urged one commenter on the jilted groom’s Instagram feed.
But dig into these courtships — I watched, so you don’t have to — and you’ll find that the problem was simpler, and maybe sadder. Ultimately, what bothered the women on Love is Blind wasn’t that their would-be husbands had different views. It was that the men tried to avoid the subject completely, or seemed to have little practice discussing it. At the same time politics is creeping into everything — including absurd reality TV dating shows — many of us are losing the capacity, or even the desire, to talk about the issues in a noncombative way. Love is Blind is a funhouse mirror of that reality: a peek at how dull or maddening life can be when we can’t engage on politics at all.
A show that is both needlessly cruel and ridiculously watchable, Love is Blind is based on the premise that two people can fall deeply in love without knowing what the other one looks like. For 10 days, contestants go through a set of “dates” in adjacent rooms called pods. Talking through opaque walls, they have the kinds of conversations that happen late at night in a college dorm, from sexual innuendo to personality-test-deep introspection (“tell me about your biggest insecurities”). At the end of the process, some couples agree to get married — yes, married — and meet in person after that in a dramatic reveal. The stakes here are low: People cast on a Netflix reality show are bound to be reasonably telegenic.
The reveal, at any rate, is only the beginning. The show puts its couples through the paces of planning a wedding, condensing a standard courtship into six or so frenzied weeks. They move in together, shop for wedding dresses, cut loose at bachelor parties and end up at a formal ceremony where they’re asked for a final “I do” or “I don’t.” Unsurprisingly, the show has a pitiful track record for actual nuptials. Relationships bred in the hothouse air of a reality TV set tend to wither in real life, as friends and relatives ask the same obvious question: “Why don’t you just date for a while and see how it goes?”
So it went with this season’s most notorious couple. Sara Carton, an oncology nurse, and Ben Mezzenga, an “account executive” for an unnamed type of account, bonded in the pods about their mutual love for air fryers, their fathers’ steaks and the video game Halo. Out in the real-ish world, they marveled at their mutual attraction and support. Over and over, Sara — in keeping with reality TV parlance, we’re calling the contestants by their first names — declared that Ben was everything she wanted in a husband. He was, she said, “Someone who is self-intuitive. Someone who is fun, … someone who’s, like, spice of life, like ‘cup half full.’ And someone who’s, like, emotionally intelligent.”
Still, there were signs of a rift all along, which mirrored some familiar political divides. Ben grew up in a conservative family and went to church every week. Sara, who has a lesbian sister, abandoned the Catholic church because of its anti-LGBTQ+ stance. In the pods, Sara asked Ben if he would go to Pride Week; he said “yes” (adding, antiseptically, “I support that community”). But he acted like a turtle retracting into its shell any time Sara asked him what his church preached about LGBTQ+ rights. He didn’t remember, he said. Or maybe he wasn’t there that day. At a reunion show last week, he offered an even less satisfying answer: Because the subject didn’t affect him personally, he hadn’t bothered to think about it at all.
A similar conflict was brewing with another couple: Devin Buckley, a high school basketball coach, and Virginia Miller, who has the vaguely defined job of “health care recruiter.” In all their conversations, the concept of an impending presidential election apparently never came up until one night, a couple of weeks before their wedding day. As they snuggled in bed, Virginia, musing on subjects that might be dealbreakers for their relationship, asked Devin, “What about politics?”
Devin looked as if he wanted to melt into the covers. “I’m not super big into politics. I don’t have a strong stance on in it,” he said, before asking Virginia, “Are you one side or the other?” When she told him she supports abortion rights and LGBTQ+ rights, and asked if he’d vote the same way, he demurred and referred vaguely to his church.
Their conversations underscored the complexity of partisan politics — even in Minnesota, the reliably blue state where the show was filmed, and where Trump nonetheless made electoral gains since 2016. Both Ben and Devin represented the cultural power of conservative churches; both fell back on church teachings as an excuse for not having thought through the issues. Sara was a stand-in for the secular ecumenicism of the left. Virginia, who is Black, reminded Devin, who is biracial, that most Black voters support Democrats, underscoring the role identity can play in shaping political views.
Still, for most of the season, the show treated these conflicts as mere blips along the way to happily-ever-after, no different from the ex-girlfriend eruptions and personality differences that are typical roadblocks on the show. Then, moments before he walked her down the aisle to the sounds of Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major, Sara’s stepfather raised a pointed question. “Is he smart?” he asked about her soon-to-be husband. “If he’s not smart, you’re in trouble.”
At this moment, Sara seemed to have an epiphany: Yes, Ben was, like, emotionally intelligent, but maybe he wasn’t intelligent intelligent. At the very least, he hadn’t bothered to formulate his own opinions, which might, in her mind, have been worse.
“I remember I asked him about Black Lives Matter,” she told her mother and sister after calling off the wedding. “He was like, ‘I guess I’ve never really thought too much about it.’ That affected me. Especially in our own city … how did it not make you think about something?”
Virginia, too, seemed frustrated with Devin’s apathy. “I thought people were going to be able to have abortions. I didn’t know we had to go back and debate that one again,” she mused to him in their pillow-talk conversation. When Devin said nothing, she pressed him: “What do you think? Care to comment — or no?”
It’s a valid question, especially at a moment in time when it seems rather clear that elections have consequences. (After a long pause, Devin began, “I kind of go back and forth…”) On The View, Whoopi Goldberg defended Ben: “There’s a lot of people who, politics is not their thing. It’s just not their thing.” And among young voters, Ben and Devin are not alone. A post-election poll from CIRCLE, a civics research institute based at Tufts University, found that youth voter turnout dropped between 2020 and 2024. More than 30 percent of voters aged 18-34, across race and gender, said they didn’t register to vote in 2024 because “it’s not important to me.”
Love is Blind, in other words, feels like an illustration of a broader political problem: So many people, perhaps turned off by talking-head bluster and social media nastiness, are looking to avoid conversations about politics at all. If Congress is filled with people talking at, not with, each other, family life has become a place where you shouldn’t raise the subject at all — like the Thanksgiving dinner where the primary directive is to not engage your bitter great-uncle.
There are, in fact, strategies for navigating political differences at home, which seem to have worked for Gen X/Boomer cross-party couples. And if Love is Blind has any lessons to share about marriage, perhaps it’s that there’s value in showing your spouse that you’re capable of talking things out. Ben, for one, seems to have gotten the memo. Last week, when a NewsNation anchor asked him if he planned to “to be more open about politics,” the rejected groom sounded all in.
“Yeah, that’s probably my biggest takeaway,” Ben said. “I had always been someone who’s avoided that conversation. … Now I’m kind of leaning more into the conversation.”
Whether that would have changed Sara’s mind is an open question. An attempted reconciliation with Ben, after the cameras stopped rolling, apparently went poorly — suggesting that getting engaged after 10 days might just not be the greatest idea. But she learned something, too: that politics is worth knowing in a marriage, if for no other reason than to have something real to talk about.
“Whatever you believe, have the conversation,” she told her mom and sister in the aftermath. “I’ve always thought I’d want to be with someone who was more curious.” There’s nothing worse than a boring marriage, till death do you part.
