"Love is Blind" gets political

The Netflix dating show exposes the political awareness and partisan divide in Gen Z

Anyone who wants to understand the growing political gender gap in young people—and the crisis this poses for American democracy—should consider watching the latest season of Love is Blind.

‘Love is Blind? You mean that show where people talk to each other through a wall and get engaged without seeing each other?’ Yes, that’s the one.

As unhinged as it often is, the Netflix dating show, which is set in a different city each season, is also a strangely precise cultural barometer. The first season premiered in February 2020, just as COVID was beginning to spread across the globe, and became a sensation in part because of the uncanny way it mirrored our social distancing reality. The show has also prompted numerous lawsuits from contestants, including a potentially historic case before the National Labor Relations Board, which seeks to redefine contestants as employees entitled to job protections.

Season 8, which recently concluded its run on Netflix, was filmed in Minneapolis last year, just a few months ahead of the election. And while many viewers have grumbled about the relatively tame Midwestern cast—even dubbing the show Love is Bland—the season offered a fascinating look at the growing partisan divide between young men and women, and how it is affecting the romantic prospects of an entire generation.

In the much-discussed season finale, two women with more liberal views turned down their conservative-leaning fiances at the altar, citing political differences as a key factor in their decisions. What’s so telling is not just that these women identified as liberal, but that they were willing to articulate their values, unlike their would-be partners, who were sheepish—and downright evasive—about their personal politics.

Over the course of the season, Sara Carton, a twenty-nine-year-old oncology nurse, had pressed her fiance Ben Mezzenga, a twenty-eight-year-old self-employed real estate developer about his stances on issues like LGBTQ+ rights and Black Lives Matter. She expressed particular concern about the Minneapolis megachurch he attended every Sunday, and wanted to know whether it was inclusive, because her sister is gay. Mezzenga was evasive, saying he hadn’t thought much about any of these issues, even the murder of George Floyd, which happened in their city. He claimed he was simply apolitical, and hadn’t voted in the last election.

On the altar, Carton told Mezzenga she couldn’t go through with the wedding because “I’ve always wanted a partner to be on the same wavelength.” She was also frustrated by his apparent apathy: “Equality, religion, the vaccine—I brought up all these things. Whatever you believe, at least have the conversation. There was no curiosity coming from his side,” she later said.

Courtesy of Netflix

Virginia Miller, a thirty-four-year-old healthcare recruiter, found herself in a similar situation with Devin Buckley, a twenty-eight-year-old youth sports director. The couple had bonded over their shared Christian faith, and even signed a prenuptial agreement, at Miller’s insistence. But they had just one awkward conversation about politics on camera before their wedding day, when Miller told Buckley she wasn’t going to marry him. (Causing him to weep.)

“I didn’t like that we had differences in politics,” she later said, adding that she was particularly troubled by the way he talked about his beliefs. “Devin said that he was raised in a conservative household and he asked me if I voted with my faith in mind. That was off-putting because I do vote with my faith in mind.”

In the post-season reunion, Miller went into greater detail about her decision.

“We just were not in alignment on some really important things. Devin told me a lot about his core values, something that he did not want to talk about on camera. I still, to this day, don’t really feel comfortable telling you Devin’s views, but I will be really clear about mine,” she said, as her mother, Mary Frances Clary, nodded in agreement in the audience.

(What Netflix didn’t tell viewers: Clary is a Democratic member of the Minnesota house of representatives.)

“I 100% support the LGBTQ community, I also believe that women should have the decision to choose if they want to have an abortion or not. I also believe that different religions should be valued.”

Carton and Miller have both been attacked by conservatives on social media. Carton, who is white, has also gotten derided by some progressives for supposedly “virtue-signaling.” But they are hardly the only women of their generation to find themselves at odds with prospective romantic partners over politics.

According to an analysis by Gallup released last year, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of young women who identify as politically liberal over the last two decades. From 2001 to 2007, 28 percent of women aged 18-29 identified as liberal, just three points higher than young men. From 2017 to 2024 that number had surged to 40 percent, and is 15 points higher than young men. In November’s election, 56 percent of young men voted for Trump, compared to 40 percent of young women—a 16-point gulf.

The gender gap has been a force in American politics for decades, but it has become a yawning chasm. Women moved to the left during the Trump era, as the #MeToo movement and the overturning of Roe v. Wade put women’s bodily autonomy on the line. Young men, meanwhile, are struggling with a more nebulous sense of disenfranchisement, with economic and cultural changes that have made Trump’s chest-thumping masculinity appealing to many.

Social scientist Richard Reeves has attempted to understand why so many young men are feeling left behind—and why, by many metrics (including college graduation rates), they are less successful than their female counterparts. In 2024, Trump made a targeted appeal to this demographic, through appearances on podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience and This Past Weekend With Theo Von. It worked: young men, once thought to be too apathetic or too hapless to make it to the polls, instead swung decisively in favor of Trump and helped him return to the White House. Now, as Andrew Marantz chronicles this week in the New Yorker, Democrats are struggling to win back the so-called bros by acknowledging their understandable frustration. "They can’t afford college or rent, they can’t get a date, they can’t imagine a stable future," he writes.

Dissatisfaction with the "swipe right" culture of dating apps is part of what makes Love is Blind appealing to both men and women.

For the uninitiated, the show bills itself as a social experiment following a group of singles as they attempt to find out whether love is, in fact blind—and if meaningful emotional connection is more important to a long-term relationship than physical attraction.Instead of going on normal dates, the contestants, evenly divided by gender, sit in windowless rooms (“pods”) talking to prospective partners from opposite sides of a wall. They only see each other when, and if, they become engaged. After about 10 days, the couples leave the pods for the real world, where they spend several weeks cohabitating, with the goal of getting married in the season finale.

The first season of Love is Blind was riveting, trainwreck TV full of messy drama and ridiculous love triangles, but it led to two marriages that remain intact more than five years later. Love is Blind has become one of Netflix’s most enduringly popular shows and spawned a global franchise, with more than a dozen international spin-offs set in places like Mexico, the U.K., Brazil, Japan, and Sweden. The show has a surprisingly high success rate—at least when compared to other reality TV dating shows like The Bachelor/Bachelorette. Over eight seasons of Love is Blind in the U.S., 14 couples have gotten married; 3 of those have gotten divorced. Several have started families.

The show’s earnest creator, Chris Coelen, who speaks about Love is Blind with the fervor of a religious leader, would likely say the success rate is because “the process works.” And it is true that, because of the accelerated timeline the couples face as they contemplate marriage within a matter of weeks, they tend to have difficult conversations—about subjects like money and children—much earlier than they might in a more casual dating environment.

Yet over the first few years of the show, politics rarely came up—at least not in the final edit. There were conversations about more specific issues like birth control and abortion, and fuzzier references to “values,” but people weren’t shown talking about their party affiliation or their vote. (That didn’t stop fans from speculating wildly about who was or wasn’t MAGA.) Season 7, set in Washington D.C., was the first in which Trump was mentioned by name; Season 8 was the first in which politics became a romantic dealbreaker. If the current patterns hold, it won’t be the last.

Meredith Blake is The Contrarian’s culture columnist