Love is Blind (2022)

Whether you love to hate or hate to love reality TV shows, it seems that they are here to stay, especially the romantic, find-your-true-love variety.

Hosted by the happily married couple Vanessa and Nick Lachey, as Netflix’s Love is Blind enters its second season, we find a more racially diverse (although still heteronormative) cast of twenty and thirty-something singles searching diligently for their soul mates.

Alongside the expected white participants, south and east Asian, black, and Latino men and women are present and highlighted on their hopeful quests for true love. The catch? The thirty men and women who begin dating do so always through an opaque glass barrier separating them across the women’s and men’s “pods”. The result, six couples got engaged sight-unseen and headed to Cancun, Mexico for the honeymoon before the honeymoon.

The African American couple, Jarrette Jones and Iyanna McNeely, are one of the six pairs that head to the luxury hotel. But they hit a speed bump in Cancun in the form of Mallory Zapata, the mixed-race Latina to whom Jarrette initially put out feelers about a possible proposal back in the pods. Mallory said no, instead choosing to move forward with her Latino love, Salvador Perez.

Of course, they’re all in Cancun together! So, is there trouble in paradise? Of course! Isn’t that part of why we watch? But we also see couples trying earnestly to sort through the complexity of romantic relationships, grappling with what is real and what was performance in their new potential life partner.

What is the everyday messy self of their new potential life partner and what was their “best-foot-forward” personality in “the pods”? One couple implodes before the six pairs can even fly back to Chicago, and two get hitched, but they may not be the ones you expected.