A disastrous "Love Is Blind" season asks: Does Gen Z really believe in marriage?

Despite promising to deliver on the fantastical idea of falling in love — sight unseen — through a wall in a pod, it seems like even the people on "Love Is Blind" aren't even getting married anymore. In the season's horrific detour from the run of the mill, only one confusing couple has survived the what felt like the show's version of "The Hunger Games." And let's just say, I don't have the utmost faith in them either.

The couple I'm talking about is Lydia and Milton. Lydia is a 30-year-old outspoken geologist (who was also accused of Instagram stalking her condescending ex-boyfriend, Uche, a fellow contestant) and her partner, Milton is a level-headed 24-year-old engineer. Every other couple this season crumbled against the pressure of the show's formulatic experiment: To find love through a wall in a pod, devoid of ever seeing each other until . . . well, they're engaged.

One couple, Stacy and Izzy, could not make their different financial backgrounds mesh. Ladies, dump the man you love at the altar if he has a bad credit score. Another flop couple, JP and Taylor, didn't even make it into the honeymoon phase because JP thought Taylor looked like a gremlin drenched in Fenty Beauty Pro Filt’r Foundation shade 160. Lydia and Milton have their differences: distinct cultural backgrounds, an occasional language barrier, a seven-year age difference, and not to mention Milton's habit of scattering and leaving wet towels around his place. However, those weren't enough to stifle their growing, yet volatile relationship. 

Much has been made by viewers about Lydia's passionate nature; she spent a lot of the season being pulled across different emotional territory, from fuming to delicate to heartbroken to cunning. Meanhile Milton has remained the levelheaded unconventionally young fiancé, who continuously talked Lydia down.

At various points across the season, Milton showed many signs he was the calm in Lydia's storm, but to me, he didn't necessarily have the emotional vocabulary of the committed husband for whom Lydia was obviously searching. It's why I was shocked when the couple actually married each other in the season finale of the show.

In the recently released reunion episode, the couple is still going strong, a year after their marriage was filmed. They are now 25 and 32. In the long run, Lydia and Milton's relationship may or may not work, but they are all "Love Is Blind" has to show us in this year's catastrophe. And if their obvious lifestyle, maturity and personality incompatibility are a showcase for love winning — I think we're doomed.

As someone who is the same age as Milton was when he and Lydia married, I can confidently say I am nowhere near ready for a real relationship — let alone a marriage. Sure, all couples may squabble about things like who is leaving the wet towels around, or whether they want to live in a bachelor-style bare-walls apartment, but when the camera shows us Milton's seeming inability to fully accept Lydia's larger-than-life personality, it raises questions about their compatibility, as well as their rush to marriage. 

While there are mature 24 year olds out there, Milton was accused by an alleged ex-girlfriend of not actually breaking up with her prior to going on the show. True or not, I could always tell there was a level of immaturity and fear of commitment in the competitive Pokéman player.

Other contestants even questioned Milton's maturity and commitment to marriage at the beginning of the experiment. Even Milton's parents question why a 30-year-old woman would want to marry a 24-year-old with very little life experience. A gender role reversal would also pose the same question for me, too — and it's not just me. 

Gen Z has a fraught relationship with, well, relationships. 

Milton is an outlier from most people born from 1995 to 2012. According to 2022 US Census Bureau, 34% of people who are 15 years or older have never been married, an 11% increase from the 1950s.

In a poll from the Thriving Center of Psychology,  two out of five Gen Z and Millennials thought that marriage was outdated; per the poll a disproportionate number of women (69%) compared to men (27%) have felt this way. The poll also stated that 85% of people thought that marriage isn't necessary to have a committed relationship. While a majority of Zoomers still want to get married, there's a growing number of people that are rejecting the ideas of traditional relationship markers. Some are also ditching monogamous, heteronormative dating all together.

The state of young people's long term relationships are in flux, just like "Love Is Blind"'s microwave-a-relationship formula. But one thing that we can be sure of is that people are still looking for love, no matter what unconventional form it takes. We don't often meet people in the same way as our parents did 20 or 30 years ago. There's no age limit on when you should or shouldn't be married, but I desperately plead to my fellow Zoomers — don't go on "Love Is Blind" to find it.