Love is blind, but does it care about politics?

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Love Is Blind Season 8

In the real world, few highs are more precarious than a new relationship. You meet, you start dating and each new thing you have in common sets butterflies free in your stomach. At the same time, the more cynical among us might spend those early days waiting for the record-scratch moment. Does this person believe in conspiracy theories like the “Emerald Tablets of Thoth”? Who did they vote for in the last election, if they voted at all? And what if they don’t keep up with current events well enough to offer even a half-baked opinion on one of America’s biggest social movements?

Welcome to Love Is Blind Season 8 — further proof that Netflix’s foundational reality dating franchise is way better (and messier) when politics enter the chat. Why don’t all of these shows give us the goods like this?

This season flies viewers to Minneapolis, where the usual gaggle of telegenic 20- and 30-somethings are eager to find love. During the first six episodes, their conversations about politics are both fascinating and revealing. For example, Sara Carton, a 29-year-old oncology nurse, makes it a point to ask her new love, 28-year-old developer Ben Mezzenga, to explain his political beliefs.

His response? “I’m, like, kind of ignorant toward that stuff. Like, I didn’t vote in the last election. As long as I don’t know, it’s not gonna do much,” he told her in Episode 4. When pressed to share a position on Black Lives Matter, given that George Floyd died at the hands of Minneapolis police, he waffled again: “I’m not one way or another. I just kind of keep out of it.”

Carton had previously been relieved to hear that Mezzenga would be supportive of her sister, who is gay, and that he’d feel comfortable attending Pride events with them. But these new revelations, she said, were “annoying.” After the date, a jubilant Mezzenga told the guys he had a girlfriend; Carton seemed more unsure.

Meanwhile, in another pod, David Bettenburg and Molly Mullaney agreed that couples don’t necessarily need to share all of the same political views — although they do both see some hypocrisy in the Republican platform.

It would have been shocking to see these conversations on the show just a few years ago. During its early seasons, Love Is Blind mimicked most reality TV dating franchises and included only occasional, carefully curated looks at participants’ political conversations.

In Season 1, we knew that Giannina Gibelli and Damian Powers’s dramatic breakup stemmed, at least in part, from a difference in beliefs, but the details were fuzzy. Occasionally, the show would air a deep and revealing conversation, like Nancy Rodriguez and Bartise Bowden’s abortion discussion in Season 3, but for the most part, viewers were left to guess at everyone’s politics based on their embrace of words like “patriot” and, in one case, American flag swim trunks.

For a show that bills itself as a social experiment, the hesitation always struck me as cowardly.

All of that began to change with Season 7. Set in Washington, D.C., and released just one month before the 2024 election, Love Is Blind Season 7 dropped the conversational soft focus that had made some of its predecessors feel so sanitized.

Viewers saw Marissa George talking about her difficulties dating a Trump supporter for a few years with one of her prospects, Bohdan Olinares, who shared his disdain for anyone who would vote for “a guy who tried to overthrow the government.” Audiences watched as Stephen Richardson admitted he voted for Trump in 2016 because he didn’t like Hillary Clinton, which did him no favors when he jovially called his future fiancée, Monica Davis, whose parents are Black and Honduran, a “mutt.” And of course, people watched in shock and awe while Marissa and her fiancé, Ramses Prashad, discussed their differing views on the military, “the hammer of U.S. imperialism,” and of course, condoms.

Love Is Blind is, at its core, is a speed-dating show for hot people. Still, there’s value in seeing how these discussions unfold both within the pods and outside them.

Aside from the news, most of the political discussions we see on TV happen in scripted series. Shows like Veep are painfully hilarious, and darker dramas like Succession might brilliantly articulate the moral rot that’s spread through American institutions, but at the end of the day, these are still products of writers’ imaginations. They depict American politics through a specific lens, which isn’t the same as capturing them as they actually are.

Most reality shows avoid the subject entirely. See: the Bachelor franchise, which mostly avoids political discussions as much as possible. Exceptions include Tayshia Adams and Ivan Hall’s discussion of Black Lives Matter in 2020, which was followed by the disastrous debut of Matt James, the first Black Bachelor. In 2018, when Bachelorette Becca Kufrin unwittingly got engaged to a man who had “liked” a slew of offensive Instagram posts, the show refrained from discussing the actual content of those posts, even as he apologized for them on air during the finale.

By airing political conversations, Love Is Blind gives us a clearer window into not only its central couples but also how average Americans think about politics. Sure, love is blind, but are these folks willing to trade in their principles for a theoretical lifelong commitment?

Not exactly. But as one might expect, some folks’ values are more coherent than others. I, for one, really wish we could have seen Bettenburg talk politics with his eventual fiancée, Lauren O’Brien. Instead, he shares that conversation with Mullaney, his runner-up. On one hand, Bettenburg said, he gets where Republicans are coming from because he too wants “less taxes and less government in my life.” On the other hand, “liberals have, probably, better hearts. They want more love throughout the country and world,” he told O’Brien. Neither of them stated who they voted for in the last election. Watching the episode, I found myself wondering if that question even came up.

In the pods, at least, political alignment sometimes seems to become a matter of faith. Just like participants who find out their one true love has cheated in the past, Carton must decide if Mezzenga’s past apathy can predict his future behavior. She insists that she “can’t teach” him about “fundamental values,” and at the same time, he promises that he’d never put her in that position. Now that they’re engaged, we’re about to find out how well he holds up his end of the bargain.

Love Is Blind is not on a mission to change hearts and minds, so politics will only ever be a fraction of the equation. Still, these past two seasons prove it’s an important piece of the puzzle.

These conversations between contestants make the relationships feel more nuanced. They give us a clearer idea of where couples align and where they don’t, and in some cases, they help contextualize breakups that would otherwise feel sudden. Perhaps more importantly, they reflect back to us at least a partial view of how values factor into American dating — the areas where people are willing to compromise versus those where they refuse. These moments, more than anything, are what makes “reality” TV feel real.