It took nine seasons, but it happened. For the first time in Love Is Blind’s five-year history, no couples said “I do” at the altar. This season, the show finally answered the question: Is love really blind? And the answer they landed on was a big fat “no.”
To be clear: I wasn’t rooting for any couple to actually tie the knot, but given the premise of the show, it’s still disappointing. If a hot, single, wannabe influencer can’t find a partner on Love Is Blind, then what hope is there for the rest of us? Well, there might still be some, but given that reality TV is meant to reflect reality, I’m starting to have doubts. Which is why I think it’s time to finally call it: Love is dead—at least it is on reality TV.
Dating reality TV shows giving up on love feels eerily on theme for 2025. It’s fully in keeping with dwindling monoculture (I miss you, The Summer I Turned Pretty) and the inescapable feeling of existential dread that plagues every single piece of media we consume. The government shutdown is putting SNAP benefits at risk, health insurance premiums are going up, and the suffering in Gaza continues. The only way to hold onto hope—if you’re a media junkie like me—is through escapism, which is something I used to be able to get from watching two beautiful “normies” fall in love on television.
Granted, reality TV shows have never really been about true love. The Love Is Blind experiment itself has always been flawed—it doesn’t so much ask whether or not love is blind as it does whether or not love can be rushed. And while the first handful of seasons were initially successful (Lauren and Cameron forever!), as the years go on, the cracks are beginning to show. And couples are starting to split—5 out of 14 couples who have tied the knot on Love Is Blind have since filed for divorce. That means over one-third didn’t make it more than a few years. Pretty damning evidence that people who’ve never seen each other can’t—or shouldn’t—get engaged.
But past seasons at least had the thrill of televised weddings to convince us to believe in love at no sight. Love Is Blind season 9 is the first season that has failed to deliver that hope. It is, for lack of a better term, a total bummer.
It’s not just the Netflix hit that has given up on love.
Even the Bachelor franchise has thrown in the towel. In a transparent effort to boost ratings, producers turned Bachelor in Paradise into a Love Island knock off, where established couples competed for cash instead of engagement rings. Then Bachelor Nation announced that instead of launching a new season of The Bachelor (which was next in the line-up), we’re getting a new season of The Bachelorette starring The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ Taylor Frankie Paul.
This isn’t the first instance of stunt casting in the Bachelor universe, but it is the most obvious and most shameless. Taylor earned her spot in the public eye after going viral for exposing a “soft swinging scandal” in Mormon #MomTok; she has three young kids; and she was arrested in 2023 and charged with assault, criminal mischief, and commission of domestic violence in the presence of a child.
None of these things make her unworthy of love or of being the lead in a reality television show, but they do make her an anomaly in Bachelor Nation, which has only had a handful of single parent leads and even fewer with known criminal records. In any other season, casting someone with a record of domestic violence would be a huge scandal, but Taylor Frankie Paul already has a proven audience, not to mention 1.8 million followers on Instagram, so I guess it’s fine.
This feels like a desperate bid for relevance. Intended to help the show find ratings rather than help contestants find love. Of course, more cynical fans will note that this was always the case. And that may be true, but at least before they had the decency to pretend to be about finding The One. Now, it feels like these shows aren’t even trying to keep up the facade, and it’s about as appealing as a Hinge profile full of identical gym selfies.
So, RIP reality TV romance, it was fun while it lasted.
