Those who know how reality TV works may take issue with Chris Coelen viewing “Love Is Blind” as a documentary. "We just want to know what's the truth, what's happening,” the creator of the unscripted romance hit told Salon on Thursday, “And so then you try to fill in the gaps.”
Coelen is referring to developments the audience witnessed during its recently completed and Washington, D.C.-set seventh season, and more specifically, the decision of two couples to have sensitive conversations off-camera, one of which was a soft preview to the end of their relationship.
Wednesday’s reunion episode caught up with the participants one year after their tumble through “the experiment,” as the show’s producers along with hosts Vanessa and Nick Lachey refer to its matchmaking premise. During the 88-minute spectacle, exes Timothee Godbee and Alexandra Byrd explained why everything seemed fine in one scene and the next found them on the verge of a breakup. Eventually, they did call the whole thing off, seemingly out of nowhere.
“I love that they ultimately did that on the reunion,” Coelen said, “But I think it was to their detriment that they didn't do it during the experiment itself.”
“I'm all for being really transparent and open about whatever people are talking about,” Coelen added, pointing to the couple‘s explanation from “slightly different perspectives.” Godbee voiced his concerns about how he might come across to the audience, while Byrd said she was trying to protect him and his image from the production.
To Coelen, participants who hide things during the process of “Love Is Blind” are only damaging their own relationships. “It just creates a negativity. And the people who are much more open about, ‘Hey, I’ve got an issue, “Hey, I'm feeling a certain way’ . . . ultimately, whether they work out or not, benefit from that.”
“We're not filming with them 24/7. We only know what they tell us,” he added. “And I know sometimes that's frustrating for a viewer like, why weren't they there? Because we're not ‘Big Brother.’ We aren't there all the time.”
It’s worth noting that Coelen offered this perspective unasked, and as a tangent to a conversation about the relationship “Love Is Blind” participants have to broader social and political conversations simmering throughout American culture.
Understandable. In the aftermath of the show's tea-spilling reunions, which take place a year after the action is filmed, its fandom takes to the Internet to speculate on pillory participants who may not have received the glowiest edits. (There's also the matter of published reports in The New Yorker and Business Insider detailing past contestants' claims, some of which are related to ongoing lawsuits, that producers engineer the action to create a toxic environment. Coelen's production company Kinetic Content has steadfastly denied those allegations.)
But the season’s larger tensions had nothing to do with dating across party lines or who someone voted for. Whether a couple lasted or didn’t ultimately came down to how openly they communicated. In the end, two Season 7 couples made it to the altar and are still together.
With Coelen looking ahead to the Valentine's Day 2025 premiere of the Minneapolis season, currently in post-production, we spoke to him about the topics that entered the seventh season chat, what the series tells us about dating, and what to expect next.
The following interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
I’ve seen every season of “Love Is Blind,” and I don't recall if any participant in a previous season distinctly identified who they voted for. Has that happened before?
I can't tell you for a fact whether people have talked about it or not talked about it in the past, or how much. I'm assuming that it's happened sometimes. I mean, there are so many conversations that happen in the pods that it is humanly impossible to know everything, even as much as I'm in the raw footage. . . If somebody's conversation around politics feels relevant to their story, then we'll endeavor to include that. We're really looking to include things in the stories that feel like they are relevant to them or the choices that they're making.
As the “Love Is Blind” franchise has expanded into international editions, and discussion around it has expanded, viewers have remarked on the differences in how this format translates between cultures. But I think that's true of the American version, too. I’ve been married forever, but in watching the Seattle season I recognized regionally specific issues that I’ve heard about. All our different cities have very distinct dating cultures. Were you aware of any DC dating culture truisms when you brought the show to that city?
"In my mind, we never set out to prove that love is blind. That was never the intention."
I personally was not, no. I've read a lot about it after the fact, people from DC saying how awful, in their words, the dating culture is. The only thing that I was aware of was it's a big metropolitan region that we haven't been to before, and so we thought it was an interesting place to go to. And there's a diversity of kinds of people there. That was what we looked at.
... I can't tell you that it is or isn't more awful than anywhere else. . . I'd just seen articles from, you know, the Washington Post, or the Washingtonian or whatever that describe the dating culture in DC as really terrible. So I don’t think there are a lot more specifics around that, but that's how they describe it.
From articles I’ve read and from the perspective of somebody that I know who's single and lives there, part of what makes DC a uniquely challenging terrain for a single person is the fact that so many people work in government or for politicians.
Related to that, I think that “Love Is Blind” is somewhat unique in that there are fewer expectations of outcomes that you might see in other dating or romance reality shows. I wonder if that makes things more challenging from city to city, especially after seven seasons.
I don't think it makes it challenging. I think it makes it exciting because you never know what you're going to get, or the kinds of things that people are going to talk about. There are some staples of, you know, what you want your future to look like, and where geographically do you want to live, and do you want to stay in the same region? Kids or no kids. You know, that kind of thing.
But I definitely think that the way people talk to each other continues to evolve. . . There's obviously nuance to geographic regions within the US, and obviously, there are distinctions around the world. But generally, people are people and are concerned about the same kinds of things and in their heart of hearts, want the same sorts of things for themselves if they're in that place where they're ready for sort of a longer-term, committed relationship. Maybe not at every stage of their life, but at that place in their life, I think people are much more similar than you'd probably realize.
So on Salon’s Culture desk, all of us watch the show from different generational perspectives. One of my colleagues is younger and single, and she wrote that the formula for “Love Is Blind” is broken and asked, “So why do we keep watching?” What is your answer to that?
I'm always interested to hear what people's take is on it. In my mind, we never set out to prove that love is blind. That was never the intention. I think the idea of love being blind is sort of an ideal that many of us would like to believe is true.
It's funny, when we were first designing the title card for the show we were like, “Oh, wouldn’t it be fun to have the “is” sort of flip, like on a hinge? So it's like, “Love is Blind/ Is Love Blind”? Because that's kind of the point of it being an experiment.
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So saying it's broken, I guess that depends on what your perspective is . . . The point isn't that they get engaged, or [whether] they get married or not. The actual question at the heart of the series is whether that feeling, that love that many people describe, is that enough to survive whatever the real world throws at them? And the people who get the altar and say yes, say, “I do," you know, the fact that 11 of those 13 couples who have done that so far are still together. . . supports the theory and the idea of what the show really is about.
For me, making it, it's completely unpredictable. Season 8 is completely different, you know, and I think the fact that we try to just lean into whatever it's giving us, seeing people's speculations throughout the years of, “Oh, now the producers want this to happen,” “Oh, now they think we want mean girls.” No. In the Seattle season, that's just what happened. That’s what keeps it really interesting and fun.
As with any successful unscripted series even if people don't watch, they know the formula. There are certain reality competition series where the first and second seasons are seen as more authentic, and afterward, there's an awareness of what the expectation is that changes the show's dynamic.
That is the inevitability of the observer effect: Any time something is closely observed it changes the thing that is observed. So how do you think this has impacted “Love Is Blind” over the past almost five years and soon, eight seasons?
Because it's popular, there are people who say, “This is a way that I can get some visibility,” for whatever reason. We try to weed that out. You can't completely discount it, right? But we try to gauge if somebody's priority, if they found someone to fall in love with, that they would be interested in being married. Or are they more heavily weighted toward the idea of, “Oh, I'd like being on TV”?
By the way, we're not always right. We're human. We really try. . . . But when you're in a situation where you know someone who's come into “Love Is Blind” is serious about wanting to find love, and then somebody else somehow gets through and is just toying with them for that [exposure], that strikes me as really, really wrong and not fair to the participants.
Yes, that was a riveting conversation between Nick [Dorka] and Hannah [Jiles], with her reading his goals in his journal and making accusations about that. [One of Dorka's goals, according to Jiles' reunion report, was to become the most famous person ever on "Love Is Blind."]
There are also experiences we witness on the show where men talk about masculinity or, as Tim said during the reunion, “I'm a Black man, I can't be angry on television. I'm not going to portray that” — those concerns that speak to larger conversations outside of “Love Is Blind,” including general conversations about how to be around other people.
I mean, I love that part of it, honestly. Even though “Love Is Blind” is not about, “let's have really meaningful, weighty conversations that are relevant to what's going on in the country and in the world,” the participants are doing that.
One of the things I really enjoy about it is — and in the season I'm currently working on, Season 8, you'll see some of this — that people who develop really strong emotional bonds but find out they're on differing sides of an issue are able to kind of grapple with what that means in a way you really don't see in our culture.
You see a lot of yelling at each other in our culture most of the time. Even going back to, I think, Season 3 with Bartise [Bowden] and Nancy [Rodriguez] talking about abortion, for instance, and the way that they talked about it right, even though they're coming at it from different places, they're talking about it with care and love and compassion and respect. I think you're going to see more of that in the future.
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One from this season that sparked a lot of conversation with the audience was Ramses’ and Marissa’s talks about her military service versus his cultural upbringing and progressive views. When you were editing their story, were there discussions about how you would frame that within their specific narrative?
I mean, there are multiple conversations that they had which are very memorable, whether it's the conversation they had at the dinner table about, you know, they didn't want their officiant to be cis-hetero. When they talked about her military service, he had his opinion, and she felt judged.
For us, it's a judgment call: What feels like it's relevant to the issues that they're trying to figure out? They certainly had talked about it in the pods. It wasn't a secret that she had served in the military. But I think for whatever reason, it continued to be an issue for them. And as I think a lot of people have noted, it doesn't seem to be the thing that ultimately derailed them, but I think it's part of it.
. . .That felt like a very fraught conversation that could have derailed them, or maybe they’d come back together and figured it out. And I know in the next conversation with her friends, they talk about, you know, how they felt like they were able to overcome that and talk through it.
That was an interesting conversation too. Here are other women who had served in the military and Ramses is like, “Oh, I would never, you know, date someone that's in ...” which is a pretty bold thing to say to those people who have served. And I just thought that was interesting to see how they kind of navigated through that as well. They ultimately seem to come to a place of support, you know. At least from them.
Going back to my question about participants talking about how they voted and related topics, it seems to me in a show like this that even though you do have people sequestered in a pod and you take away their phones for a couple of weeks, the way they interact with strangers is going to be affected by any kind of seismic event occurring in the world.
Do you feel like the proximity to the election impacted any of the discussions and interactions of the upcoming Minneapolis season?
I think that would probably be in any place. To your point, and, I think it's a good point, whatever's going on in the world does affect your worldview and your concerns and your hopes and your fears for your future and potentially your future generations, right? So I don't know if I would specifically pinpoint it to the election.
. . . But I think you’re right. The worldview and the topics they talk about, it's very much shaped by what they've been exposed to, or what's going on in the culture, for sure. I think some of those are ongoing issues.
All episodes of "Love Is Blind" are streaming on Netflix.
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