SPOILERS are ahead for Love Is Blind Season 3, now streaming with a Netflix subscription.
Love Is Blind fans, we went through the ringer in Season 3 with those five couples. There were a lot of ups and downs like always, and I don’t know about you, but this season felt particularly frigid, when the Netflix dating show used to be injected with a lot more romance. Come on, Love Is Blind, sweep us away! Make us feel the blind love, ya know? As a fan of the series, I have a few thoughts about how Love Is Blind Season 4 can bring it back.
Before I get into it, I must note that, apparently, Season 4 and Season 5 have already been filmed, per Nick Lachey’s interview with Women’s Health. So while my notes might not get across to them in time, here’s what I think the show could use to improve the romance factor for the couples and the viewers. After all, even though it is a dating show, which are known for the drama, I do think in order for people to keep watching, part of us needs to believe that love can be blind.
Cast Older, More Emotionally Mature People
I know I’m not the only one who wishes the stars of Love Is Blind were older. While I totally respect people in their twenties finding their person early in life, the median age that men and women are getting married gets older every year, with recent numbers at about 31 for men and 29 for women, per Statista. With that data in mind, there are way too many 25 year olds on this series. And, in Season 3 in particular, both Zanab/Cole and Nancy/Bartise were a couple dynamic with women in their early 30s and with men in their mid-twenties. Neither of those pairs managed to work out, with plenty of drama to write home about, and also exposed both men as perhaps needing more time to grow before committing to blind love.
Thus, I hope we see the show try the experiment next with generally older, more experienced, and emotionally mature cast members who are in the age range of Americans who are getting married nowadays. I truly want to see more people fall in love on the show and have meaningful relationships, and some of the casting decisions are stunting this. Of course, only so many people are going to sign up for their love life to be public knowledge, so it may not be the Netflix show’s fault, either.
Give Us Backstories!
Another hole I’m going to poke in this very popular show is how it handles its cast members as a whole. I really noticed this season that the producers pick one or two personality traits about each person and double down on it before we really even understand who they are, which can contribute to the series coming off as kind of fake. SK is a good example of this. On one hand, the show did a fairly good job highlighting the importance of Nigerian culture to him, down to his decision at the wedding. But, on the other hand, SK’s grad school plans were randomly mentioned at one point and it completely threw me off.
I feel like it would be fun to see each person in a five minute clip regarding their life before this dating experiment commences to see who they are and give audiences more of an idea of their lives going into this. Give us backstories!
Bring Back The Cute Dates
As Love Is Blind has progressed as a series, it has become more laser-focused on the big moments of drama and tension between the couples than anything else. Yes, we’re here for all that, but in Season 3 especially, the dating show seemingly has been cutting back on showing moments of bonding for the couples. There’s a loss of balance between both. Even on the vacation that occurs directly after all of their engagements, it felt like it was all about the ex drama, and the cute dates that were set up were glazed over for other orders of business.
Due to the lack of small moments in between that allow us, as an audience, to really get invested in their love stories, it was instead constant bickering and struggles between most of them. Not only would more cute dates bring back the spark of the series, more involved dates could also strengthen their partnerships, too, and allow us to believe in them more. In the most recent season, I really wasn’t rooting for anyone, because I couldn’t feel genuine love between many of the pairings.
Get Nick And Vanessa Lachey More Involved
Lastly, I’d like to see more of Nick and Vanessa Lachey on the show. They are technically the series’ hosts and the faces of the show, and yet they rarely hang out with the couples anymore unless it's the reunion. I think many of them could benefit from a third party like the Lacheys to help them talk through their struggles and work things out intermittently throughout the season. They could have held a group check-in halfway through the experiment in order to offer up their thoughts on how the relationships were progressing, rather than their involvement being so hands off.
Or, like Married At First Sight does, the series could enlist counselors to work with engaged couples as problems arise. So much of what goes on during the show could be cleared up through couple’s counseling, especially with the goal of Love Is Blind being to move through a massive life event like becoming engaged and getting married so quickly. It’d be such a great avenue to promote the benefits of couple or individual counseling that way.
Following the events of Season 3, we know where the couples ended up following their meeting in the pods about a year and a half earlier. Two of them are still married, one of them that did not get married rekindled their romance, while the other two completely broke up. We’ll anticipate the After The Altar episodes and Season 4 and 5. Will Love Is Blind bring the romance back then?
