Love Is Blind Season 8 Proves Our Crusade Against the Bad Boyfriend Has Gone Too Far
It’s taken eight seasons, but I’m finally doing it: I’m publicly sticking up for a Love Is Blind man. (I know, I know — but hear me out!)
In Season 8 of the Netflix reality series, which premiered on Friday, a group of singles meet potential partners in adjoined rooms — called pods — in hopes that they might fall in love without the distraction of physical appearance. Per usual, the first six episodes introduced us to several contestants who dated several people, including one man named Mason Horacek — a man with a heavy dose of Midwestern vocal fry who has been deeply wronged.
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Mason spent all the early episodes dating around, meeting and conversing with each Love Is Blind woman, just as any contestant would do. He quickly fostered serious connections with two women: Madison and Meg, at which point he stopped meeting with other contestants and focused on getting to know these two ladies exclusively. He was honest about his connections with both women — each knew about the other. (Transparency is the Golden Rule in Love Is Blind.)
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But in Episode 6, Madison enters the pods on a mission for a vengeful takedown of this wholesome man, seemingly for no reason at all. Madison starts to softly break things off with him, saying she’s going to pursue a different relationship. Mason then apologizes for sharing his feelings so explicitly the day prior, when he said he might be falling in love. It was unfair to both women, and he fears he had put undue pressure on everyone involved. Plus, he didn’t even know if he fully meant it, or if he just got caught up in a moment. (For the record, I realize this all sounds nuts — how could Mason not be in the wrong for taking back a proclamation of love only after he was rejected? But I’m telling you, this is your garden-variety Love Is Blind dance — words mean nothing in the pods, and they can be tossed around and taken back on a whim! So stick with me.)
Madison tells Mason his desire to keep “two things going at once” might have lost her and Meg, which Meg never actually said herself. (When Meg learns the details of the conversation, she exclaims, “You said that? Don’t say that!”) Madison goes on to smugly deliver all the condescending epithets of a break-up conversation meant to make one person feel powerful and the other person feel small — “You’re not a bad guy!” and “Maybe we’ll be friends!” She leaves the pods and, because the best crusades aren’t done quietly, she reports back to the rest of the girls with all the gory details.
She tells the women Mason is a clown and says the breakup “tastes good.” But the other women are reluctant to join in on Madison’s anti-Mason campaign, urging Meg to hear him out. But Meg must save her ego and her image; she can’t look like a second choice. She ultimately goes into the pods to finish what Madison started: She and Mason are done. He can’t be trusted. He is a Love Is Blind Bad Boyfriend, and he never saw it coming.
But this takedown was misguided and unwarranted. We’ve gone too far.
Perhaps our reality TV girlies have been so burned by the Bad Boyfriend that they no longer are able to distinguish the difference between a minor inconvenience and serious misbehavior. Would it have been nice if Mason could have declared his love for one woman sooner? Yes! But is indecisiveness cause for verbal annihilation? For a sabotaged love experiment? And, for what we can see from the teaser of the next episode drop, an explosive confrontation at the midseason group-hang? Probably not.
Or, perhaps Madison keenly understands the power of this particular crusade. Vanderpump Rule’s Ariana Madix, after all, enjoyed a meteoric rise only after her boyfriend became Reality TV Supervillain Tom Sandoval. (Pre-#Scandoval, he was just your run-of-the-mill Gross Guy and she, an average member of an average ensemble on an average Bravo TV show.)
And don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of times in the reality TV canon where the Bad Boyfriend deserved the war waged upon him — the aforementioned Tom, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ Zac Affleck, The Real Housewives of Orange County’s Brooks Ayers and Love Is Blind’s own Shake Chatterjee, to name just a few.
But Season 8’s Mason doesn’t belong among this group — he didn’t fake cancer, and he didn’t threaten to take a woman’s children away for going to Chippendales. The Bad Boyfriend designation should be reserved for those outstanding personalities that make your brain glitch because you can’t understand who they are or where they came from, not for guys who are merely annoying or irritating or dumb. The Bad Boyfriend must be protected from the invasion of these regular-shmegular, ordinary guys, because if everyone is a Bad Boyfriend, then no one is a Bad Boyfriend! And if Bad Boyfriends go extinct, what would we ever even talk about?
What’s your take: Is Love Is Blind’s crusade against Mason taking things too far? Are we in danger of muddying the Bad Boyfriend waters? Hit the comments!
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