A devout Christian who believes that astrology is Satanic and has a photo of himself picketing a Planned Parenthood Clinic pinned to the top of his Instagram account.
A vaccine skeptic who drinks raw milk, isn’t sure whether an eleven-year-old rape victim should be able to get an abortion, and thinks unmarried women over thirty are “problematic.”
A cornhole entrepreneur who believes it’s “unmanly” to wear sandals and shop at Whole Foods.
No, these are not Republicans who lost in the midterms last week.
In fact, these are a few of the men who appeared in Love is Blind’s most recent season, set in the conservative stronghold of…Boston. Somehow, producers of the Netflix reality series scoured Boston — the largest city in one of the bluest and most educated states in the union — and managed to find a bunch of red-pilled gaslighters so loathsome they probably couldn’t even get a position in Trump’s cabinet.
The premise of Love is Blind is right there in the title: the series follows couples as they date in isolated “pods” and get engaged without seeing each other. Then they meet in person, move in together, and decide if they want to get married a few weeks later, in the season finale.
Early seasons of the Netflix reality series resulted in some surprisingly cute couples and thus far successful marriages. There was plenty of messy drama, too, but at least compared to other dating shows, like The Bachelor, Love is Blind had a pretty high batting average. The show’s accelerated timeline forced couples to talk about difficult matters like finances earlier than they might have in a more casual dating environment.
The series debuted in 2020, a few weeks before COVID forced us all to isolate like Love is Blind contestants, and was an instant cultural sensation. It has since grown to become one of Netflix’s most important franchises, spawning 11 seasons in the U.S. and dozens of incarnations around the world, from Japan and the United Kingdom to Poland and the Middle East. (As I just discovered, there’s even a Brazilian spinoff starring singles over fifty, which I am now going to have to watch.)
The international versions are fascinating because of how they reflect cultural differences around dating, sex, gender, and physical beauty.
The original American series moves to a different city each season, and each new location brings a bit of regional flavor. In Boston, there were (of course) frequent references to Dunkin Donuts, Tom Brady, and roast beef sandwiches. But whether it’s set in Denver or Columbus or Houston, Love is Blind has become a case study in the miseries of dating in the Trump era.
In early seasons of the show — or at least the final edit we saw on Netflix — people rarely talked about politics. No one even uttered the name “Trump” until Season 7, set in Washington, D.C. But over the last few seasons, politics has come to dominate the show and is now one of the most important factors that couples on Love is Blind consider when deciding on their long-term compatibility, along with religion and children.
Couples now regularly spar over issues like birth control and LGBTQ+ rights, and several women have said “no” at the altar because they didn’t agree with their fiancé’s politics. This may be a function of editing choices made to emphasize certain storylines, but it also reflects the real world. As we are all painfully aware, there was a massive partisan gap between young men and women in the 2024 election (it was smaller in 2026, but still persists).
The gender divide on Love is Blind has never been more pronounced than it was this season, which felt less like a silly guilty pleasure — something to zone out to while folding laundry — than a harrowing 12-hour horror movie about toxic masculinity and internalized misogyny. Love is Blind was never exactly a feminist triumph, but the show now seems to delight in the humiliation of women.
Rob Feeley and Michaella Giorgio were one of six couples to get engaged this season, and were the odds-on favorite for Couple That’s Definitely Going to Get Married. They met each other’s families, talked about kids, and imagined their future Christmas traditions. Then, at a series of social gatherings, Feeley, an AI sales professional who resembles a bargain-basement Kelce brother and who wooed Giorgio by doing a Trump impression, drank too much and lashed out in frighteningly belligerent fashion. The relationship fell apart before they made it to the altar.
Fans dubbed Feeley “the biggest red flag in Love is Blind history” and suggested that Kinetic, the company that produces the show, was putting women in harm’s way by casting such volatile men. In an interview with Variety, series creator Chris Coelen brushed off these criticisms.
“They’re adults, and they’re making their own choices, and we’re there to follow that,” he said, as if they were making a verite documentary and not a highly produced reality series.
Giorgio got out of the relationship before it was too late. The same can’t be said for Sarah Williams, a healthcare program manager who ignored every single warning sign and got married to John Shannon, an account manager (and raw milk aficionado). They were the only couple that actually got married this season, but were divorced by the time episodes started airing last month — and it’s not hard to see why.
While in the pods, they had sometimes excruciating conversations about subjects like vaccines and science. With the patience of a kindergarten teacher, Williams respectfully urged him to trust the experts while refuting his more dubious claims. When Shannon, a Christian, said he believed that abortion should be legal but didn’t think it should be available to someone at six months “just because you didn’t get around to it,” Williams, who is not religious, calmly explained that the number of women who get late-term abortions “just because” is vanishingly low.
At the reunion, which aired earlier this week, the couple revealed that they were no longer together. Williams left Shannon when she discovered that he had exchanged messages with an escort, but also said that he belittled her throughout their brief marriage — even calling her “dumb.” For some inexplicable reason, producers let Shannon’s father speak at the reunion. “Sometimes guys go out, and they get drunk, and they do stupid things,” he said in his son’s defense. Another cast member, Scott Shuman (a.k.a. the guy who thinks astrology is Satanic) chimed in: “That man brought his Bible to breakfast and prayed for every single person that was about to get engaged.”
Coelen also told Variety that he is proud that “we don’t take a position on any of that” — meaning the political and cultural debates that pop up throughout the season. “Our job is to be a reflection of these particular people’s journeys, and in doing that, I think we’re a really interesting mirror into the society as a whole,” he said.
But the sheer fact that they stack the show with guys who picket abortion clinics — in a state where even a majority of white men vote democratic — counts as a thumb on the scale and an intentional misrepresentation of demographic reality.
One of the more ridiculous aspects of Love is Blind is that everyone involved in the show refers to it as an “experiment,” as if they are taking part in valuable scientific research rather than trainwreck TV. But it’s actually fitting: the show has become an experiment to see just how appalling behavior women are willing to put up with in a quest for love.
Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian.