How I Almost Became a Love Is Blind Cast Member

S omehow, it seems fitting that my possible brush with fame started with a LinkedIn message. It was through the professional social-media website — which functions as a digital résumé bank — that I learned the Netflix reality-TV show Love Is Blind was interested in having me as a participant. Season 7 of the blind-dating program aired its last episode earlier this week. So it’s not a spoiler to reveal that I ultimately passed on the opportunity. That didn’t stop me from watching it, however. The experience taught me some things about myself, and about the modern state of American romance.

My initial inclination was to treat the message as a joke when I received it in April 2023. So I asked its sender if it was. He assured me he was serious, and told me to give him a call. Having learned that the then-forthcoming season of the show would draw from a D.C.-area pool, and being single at the time, I decided at least to hear him out.

The call confirmed that he was a real casting agent, and that he was indeed interested in my appearing on the show. I couldn’t quite figure out how he found me in the first place. But from what I gathered of his process, he was scouring the LinkedIn profiles of D.C.-area young professionals, seeking out people who “looked” the part (a test he assured me I passed, which was flattering — though on the phone he asked about my height), and then gambling (successfully, in my case — at the time) on whether they were single. I wondered if the season hoped to have a token conservative; my political beliefs are easier to figure out from my LinkedIn profile than my relationship status.

But I had additional hoops to jump through, as the casting agent explained. To be on Love Is Blind, I would have to commit the entirety of fall 2023 to living off-the-grid in the filming compound. And expressing interest to him over the phone would not be the final step. If I said yes, I would then have to record a long audition video. Then there was a more basic obstacle. He had figured out from our conversation something that National Review readers can probably infer as well: I was not much of a Love Is a Blind watcher at the time. In fact, I hadn’t seen a single episode. When I admitted this, he recommended that I watch the show before making up my mind.

On one level, it seemed ridiculous even to consider the opportunity. But for some reason (again: single at the time), it interested me more than I expected it to. So I watched some of the most recent season. I learned very quickly that other difficulties would arise for me if I actually ended up on the next one. The show has three stages. First, male and female groups of equal size, inhabiting separate areas of the filming compound, go on a series of “dates” that take place in connected rooms (“pods”) that they can only hear each other through. From these dates, participants attempt to pair off with one another. If one pair — or perhaps just one half of it — feels sufficient chemistry, the man will propose. If the woman accepts, they will then see each other for the first time, go on a honeymoon period of one week, then go live together in normal life for three weeks and decide whether to go through with an actual marriage. Not exactly Catholic doctrine.

Fantasies of grandeur nonetheless crept into my mind. Nobody would make me violate my precepts. Maybe I could convince a woman to violate the procedure of the show — and modern mores — with me. And in the far likelier event that the kind of women who would appear on a reality-TV show would not be for me, maybe I could just linger at the edge of the proceedings, casting judgment upon them from afar. Either way could be a shortcut to a kind of right-wing celebrity — or so my delusions, encouraged by some peers, tempted me. Reagan was an actor! Nixon went on Laugh-In! Buckley had a TV show! But my own reservations — logistical, moral — combined with superior counsel from others persuaded me to decline.

I was not done with Love Is Blind yet, however. The deliberations had made me interested enough in the show to watch the season I could have been on. The vicarious and counterfactual thrills of imagining myself among the cast would alone have sufficed to motivate me. Then there was the D.C. factor. Past seasons have taken place in normal locations, and involved people who seemed well-adjusted (though sometimes revealed otherwise). But D.C. is a strange place, full of weird people, many of them political or politics-adjacent. Would this season’s cast fill up with journalists, Hill staffers, think-tankers, activists, and others? Would they go about their social interactions in a callous, amoral, self-advancing, LinkedIn-but-in-real-life fashion befitting the Swamp? Would I know anyone? Curiosity about the show’s central premise — to explore whether love actually is blind — also played a role in my lingering interest.

Watching the season confirmed my sense that I could not possibly have fit into it well. Nobody in the group of women from whom I would supposedly choose a spouse seemed compatible with me. And none of the men with whom I would spend most of my time hanging out when not going on “dates” seemed like me at all. If I ended up on the show, I’m likely the only person who would have detected in the “pods” a hint of the priestly confessional — or felt the need to visit one. If there had been an attempt to get a token conservative on, it appears to have failed. I simply could not have seen myself doing anything other than existing on the fringes of it all, contributing nothing of interest. I would likely have been cut out entirely by the show’s editors (as was the fate of some participants) — that is, if they didn’t see fit to make me look like a fool. I’d have then gone home having accomplished nothing (as was the fate of many more participants). And there wasn’t even a zipline.

Blessedly, most of the people on this season were not involved in politics or media. This season of Love Is Blind largely avoided bringing the concomitant intrigue and monomania into the show, despite its D.C.-area cast. Politics did still intrude, however. In one blind date, Marissa, a female participant, seemed more concerned that Stephen, a male participant, had voted for Donald Trump in 2016 (he then voted for Joe Biden in 2020) than that he had cheated in his last relationship. Perhaps she should have paid more attention to the latter fact than the former, as Stephen did virtually the exact same thing again, to her. And though Leo, a wealthy art dealer, spends much time in New York, he displayed in his attempts to secure a relationship many of the manipulative and egocentric tendencies regularly evident in the Beltway.

As for whether the show’s methods work: The pods produced seven engagements, and followed six of them. Of these, two pairings — Tyler and Ashley, and Garrett and Taylor — actually became marriages. It’s either a testament to the show’s editors or to my predictive powers that these were the relationships that seemed most promising from the start. The others foundered. In some cases, former pairs left on good terms; in others, not so much. It has only been about a year since the events of this season, so who knows whether its two unions endure. Everyone else who went on the show came up short, one way or another. But Love Is Blind succeeded in assembling the elements at its disposal into the kind of TV you can’t stop watching once you’ve started. After all, it succeeded in getting me, of all people, interested.

It also revealed a striking amount of what modern sociologists would call “heteronormativity,” and what the rest of us might call human nature. Yes, there was envy, double-crossing, gossip, and heartache. It appeared easier to find out through the pods whether someone was wrong for you than whether he or she was right for you. But there were also strikingly traditional moments. For example: Though each man proposed without seeing the woman he might marry, they all felt the need to get down on one knee and ask again when they met in person for the first time.

This and other aspects of Love Is Blind — including the entire purpose of the show, which is, ostensibly, to marry people off — suggested a desire for old-fashioned romance that transcended the show’s many flaws, and may even rise above modern cultural detritus. The show’s methods of romance are all jumbled up. As a result of the blinders, physical and non-, that it has placed on participants, as well as other blinders placed on them by our debauched culture, they are reaching for something they can’t quite grasp. But it’s a testament to the enduring power of true love that they’re reaching for it anyway.

I don’t regret not pursuing my LinkedIn-spawned opportunity to go on Love Is Blind, even if it might have led to an actual appearance. It’s entertaining TV, but it’s not really for me — not so much to watch, and definitely not to experience. If the show has proven that old-fashioned romance is still out there, it is my sense, borne partly of my own experience since last April, that old-fashioned methods remain a better way of finding it.