“Love Is Blind” wrapped up its eighth season, which spanned from Feb. 14 to March 9, following five engaged couples from Minneapolis, Minn. who undergo an accelerated journey from “blind” emotional connection to marriage.
The reality show, which brings together 15 men and 15 women in a controlled dating experiment, claims to explore the question: is love blind?
By removing the visual aspect of getting to know one another by having contestants sit in separate pods, the show seeks to challenge the superficiality of modern dating by offering an alternative. After contestants get engaged, they explore if their emotional connections can match their physical attractions by going on luxurious honeymoon trips and finally entering the real (“physical”) world. The show films the engaged couples up until their wedding days.
Despite its attempt at subverting traditional dating norms by challenging participants to commit to marriage before ever seeing each other, “Love Is Blind” ultimately reinforces, and even amplifies, the capitalist structures that shape contemporary relationships.
The series ultimately commodifies human emotions, manipulates social interactions and thrives on audience engagement, functioning as an extension of capitalism.
To put it simply, love cannot exist in a capitalist society. The fundamental nature of capitalism contradicts genuine human connection. Love, in its purest form, is based on mutual care, emotional vulnerability and the prioritization of the well-being of another person without the expectation of material gain. However, capitalism operates on the principles of commodification and competition, undermining the necessary conditions for authentic love to flourish.
The Commodification of Human Emotions
The idea of giving when in love is overshadowed by the transactional nature of capitalist relations where people are trained to evaluate their relationships based on measurable benefits. The question of “What do they bring to the table?” encourages partners to be viewed as commodities, which defines their value by labels rather than embracing love as a selfless and reciprocal bond.
In “Love Is Blind,” love becomes a commodity for consumption, turning love — a deeply personal, intimate human experience — into entertainment. Contestants are encouraged to form deep emotional connections without seeing each other first, appearing to challenge the superficial aspects of modern dating.
However, the process acts as a spectacle for viewers.
Participants’ emotions and stories are packaged into a series of episodic storylines that cater to the entertainment needs of a global audience, all of which are essential to keeping audiences engaged and advertisers happy. These interactions are reduced into episodes that neatly fit into the larger capitalist enterprise of reality television where viewership and revenue are prioritized over the genuine well-being of the participants.
In “Love Is Blind,” the contestants are alienated and cut off from the outside world for the first half of the show, with no access to phones, the internet or social media — tools that typically shape modern relationships. Isolated from their usual support systems of friends, family and broader social networks, contestants are disconnected from the environments in which they typically form romantic relationships.
In this way, “Love Is Blind” replicates the alienation philosopher Karl Marx describes in his book “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” where people are removed from the social and material realities that define their existence. Instead of forming relationships based on genuine, lived experiences, contestants are placed in an artificial setting where their emotions and interactions are commercialized for entertainment.
While some might argue that this isolation forces contestants to form deeper attachments with the people around them, the reality is more nuanced. These are adults who willingly signed up for the experiment fully aware of the process, especially given the wealth of information available online about how popular the show is.
This argument could have applied to season one because the show was in its infancy. However, the show capitalizes on individuals, typically women, who are desperate to be married. These contestants make impulsive decisions or overlook red flags because they are infatuated with the ideas of love and marriage rather than the reality of building a partnership.
“Love Is Blind” exploits contestants’ desperation, pressuring them to commit in order to achieve the socially constructed ideal of romantic success. For many contestants beyond season one, the motivation to get engaged may not be solely about love but about gaining clout and stardom, further reinforcing the capitalist incentives driving the show.
The competitive nature of “Love Is Blind” compounds this inability to experience love in its purest form. Couples face intense pressure to get engaged within a highly controlled and compressed timeframe from the show’s producers, echoing the cutthroat competition of capitalist markets.
Filming an entire season in just 38 days creates a sense of time scarcity, where participants are driven to quickly “sell” themselves to potential partners, performing emotional labor at maximum efficiency. This structure pits people against one another — a dynamic Marx identifies as one of capitalism’s most harmful aspects.
The show’s compressed timeline amplifies the transactional dynamics in these romantic connections. Contestants must present themselves as desirable partners in a race against time, reinforcing capitalist values that prize competition and efficiency. Those who cannot perform on cue find themselves alienated, standing at the end of a production line, reduced to yet another component in the reality television machine.
But what does this intense pressure actually reveal about love? If contestants are forced into high-stakes emotional decisions under artificial constraints, can we call the connections they develop organic?
Television critic Judy Berman discusses reality television’s broader impacts as the normalization of competition, manipulation and the commodification of human relationships. She highlights how reality television has “conquered the culture and claimed [its] prize: our attention,” becoming a powerful vehicle for accumulating wealth and social influence. Reality television has created a new class of celebrities who, like socialite Kim Kardashian and President Donald J. Trump, leverage their appearances into billion-dollar enterprises for political or social power.
“Love Is Blind” follows a similar formula by turning love into a marketable spectacle where contestants, aware of the show’s potential career opportunities, perform for an audience while seemingly searching for a partner.
This mirrors capitalism’s broader emphasis on self-branding and competition, where success is measured by market appeal rather than authenticity. Contestants who end up having air time on the show end up receiving, to some extent, commercial and internet success which further blurs the lines between genuine connection and calculated performance.
As the show continues to release more seasons, accusations of contestants joining for the “wrong reasons” have only increased.
The most striking example of this is Trevor Sova from season six, whose leaked text messages reveal that he entered the experiment with a girlfriend he intended to marry despite professing interest in another contestant, Chelsea Blackwell. In the reunion episode, hosts and spouses Nick and Vanessa Lachey publicly call him out, using him as an example of what future contestants should not do.
Ironically, rather than exposing him as an outlier, the scandal only fueled his online notoriety, making him a hot topic of discussion and reinforcing the very dynamic “Love Is Blind” claims to reject: love as performance, dictated not by genuine emotion but by the demands of a reality television spectacle.
Capitalist Inequalities in Relationships
Beneath the surface of the show’s romantic narratives, “Love Is Blind” exacerbates existing capitalist inequalities by presenting love, and subsequently marriage, as achievable goals for all contestants regardless of their socioeconomic statuses. However, as Raju Das, a professor from York University, discusses in his Marxist critique of love, love under capitalism is far from an equal or neutral experience. Class, wealth and social status heavily influence who can participate in the experience of falling in love.
The lack of transparency about participants’ economic backgrounds, along with the show’s focus on heteronormative relationships, reflects systemic inequalities. For instance, the participants’ economic statuses are rarely explored, yet their relationships are inevitably influenced by material conditions once they leave the pods and re-enter the “physical world.” Participants are shown moving into apartments and planning their weddings after they get engaged, but the logistical and financial challenges they face are either glossed over or edited out.
There are moments where contestants may discuss someone’s job or their future career goals, but in the end, it’s not a primary focus of any couple that we have seen in the show’s history.
Out of the 37 couples that have gotten engaged throughout the show’s history so far, finances have been a focal point in only three relationships. This omission is not accidental, but rather a deliberate choice that aligns with the show’s broader capitalist framing of love as a universal, apolitical experience detached from material realities.
One instance, involving Leo Braudy and Brittany Wisniewski in season seven, highlights the show’s reluctance to engage with financial concerns in a meaningful way. Braudy, a wealthy art dealer, expresses concerns about how his financial status might impact his relationship with Wisniewski because he doesn’t want someone who is solely after his money.
However, “Love Is Blind” doesn’t follow through on this narrative.
Instead, the couple is eliminated from the storyline with producers choosing not to feature them in the group of engaged couples that travel to Mexico. By deliberately excluding this couple’s story, the show effectively silences a conversation that could have offered a more honest portrayal of how wealth and financial inequality can influence romantic dynamics.
Ultimately, it’s a missed opportunity on the show’s end to discuss unbalanced financial dynamics. The show has explored this dynamic before with Izzy Zapata and Stacy Snyder from season five where Snyder, who comes from a lavish lifestyle, struggled with the fact that Zapata had a low credit score.
The producers’ reasoning to cut Braudy and Wisniewski feels like a cop-out since the couple’s narrative didn’t fit into the sanitized, drama-driven formula that maximizes engagement and profitability.
This fact becomes even more upsetting knowing that the show has generated a lot of profit (though the show has never released its revenue numbers). As viewers, we can tell how profitable the show has become through the announcement of a mobile video game adaptation and the use of popular songs like Billie Eilish’s “BIRDS OF A FEATHER” (2024) and Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” (2013) in season eight when it can potentially cost thousands upon thousands of dollars to use songs for just 10 seconds.
The most recent example — Virginia Miller and Devin Buckley from season eight — focuses on financial pragmatism through Miller’s insistence on a prenuptial agreement (prenup). Despite initial hesitation from both Buckley and his family, he ultimately agrees to sign it.
However, the financial tensions in their relationship take a backseat to a different issue: Buckley’s reluctance to engage in political conversations, at least on camera. This becomes the dominant narrative, particularly in the season eight reunion episode, where “Love Is Blind” prioritizes discussions about their ideological differences rather than addressing how Buckley hid a $1,000 wedding gift check from his partner amongst other financial concerns Miller had.
In consistently sidelining financial discussions, “Love Is Blind” promotes a capitalist fantasy where love transcends material conditions. The show perpetuates the myth that love is an equal playing field, when in reality, financial security, just like physical attraction, plays a crucial role in determining who can truly afford to fall in love.
This isn’t a stand alone case, but Taylor Krause from season seven shared in a TikTok video explaining that she and Garrett Josemans also signed a prenup that was never aired. By omitting this discussion, “Love Is Blind” upholds the stigma surrounding prenups, reinforcing the myth that love should exist without pragmatic considerations, despite this contractual agreement becoming increasingly popular nowadays.
As viewers, we are deprived of the opportunity to engage with these crucial realities, leaving us with an incomplete picture of the relationships the show claims to document. In a capitalist society where financial success is tied to personal worth and social status, admitting to financial struggles can be seen as a threat to the romantic ideal the show tries to promote. Yet, this avoidance ultimately weakens the show’s premise by failing to acknowledge how financial inequalities impact the very relationships it seeks to explore.
The reality of “Love Is Blind” is that it operates far more like a capitalist experiment than a love experiment. The show perpetuates a shallow, transactional version of love. With the continuation of the show’s run, love does not and cannot exist within “Love Is Blind.” Instead, the markings of capitalism overtake the show’s premise and destroy anything truly meaningful, proving that love, under capitalism, is an illusion.
