Politics Won’t Tear Love Is Blind Apart

Season seven of Love Is Blind is set in Washington, D.C., but despite a brief discussion about one participant who voted for Trump and a longer consideration of the war in Ukraine, the city that seemed primed for political fireworks has been light on dramatic partisan content.

At the end of episode seven, that shifts. Marissa and Ramses, one of the engaged couples who’ve made it through their romantic getaway and are now planning to get married within a matter of weeks, are sitting across the table from one another eating dinner. Marissa’s exhausted — the participants are living in apartments provided by production, so she has a two-hour commute to Baltimore every day. Ramses has made dinner, and they launch into a conversation about wedding planning and whether to have a religious service. Marissa’s resistant because she grew up with Mormonism and now bristles at any patriarchal associations. The conversation drifts: Does Ramses believe in God? Marissa believes in past lives; Ramses suggests they watch Past Lives; Marissa wants to watch Barbie first. (Remember: It was the fall of 2023.) Marissa leaps from Barbie to her frustrations with patriarchy in the military to her complicated feelings about her military service — and then suddenly, they’re in a serious discussion. Ramses, who is from Venezuela, is strongly against American imperialism. Marissa, who spent years in the military and values that time even though she also questions aspects of military culture, doesn’t want to dismiss its good qualities. They discover a meaningful divide in their worldviews, not about voting records or party identification, but about their fundamental visions of America.

Finally, politics are happening on Love Is Blind, a show that until this point has included footage of couples wading into disputes over money, birth control, sexual orientation, cultural expectations, sexual satisfaction, religion, and whether it is acceptable to only own plastic cutlery, but has never swerved toward anything as directly political as “what role should America play on the global stage.” It’s a watershed moment for the show, a decision to embrace some of the issues that divide Americans on a national level. But it’s also a demonstration of exactly how those disagreements can play out in one-on-one conversations, and the enormous gap between how people think about abstract concepts of the world versus how they prioritize those values in their everyday lives.

Love Is Blind has never been this explicitly political in the past, although in conversations with creator Chris Coelen during the filming of this season, he suggested that it’s not through lack of interest on the producers’ part. The design of the series, in fact, tends to weed out couples who might discover deep political disagreements far enough into a relationship that it would surprise them or cause major discord. Early in their pod interactions, participants are encouraged to talk about anything they value deeply enough to be an important factor in their romantic relationships: their families, whether they want kids, their religion, their lifestyles. Political affiliations are a part of those conversations, and people who care strongly about specific worldviews or political ideologies tend to bring those things up early enough that any relationship with someone they strongly disagree with is nipped in the bud before it gets to the wedding. (While I was reporting on the pods, for instance, I saw one early date between a woman who described her ethnic background and the way it informed her political thinking and a man who immediately clarified that he was an “American patriot.” They did not date each other again after that conversation.)

So Marissa and Ramses’s conversation in episode seven, which is then reiterated in episode eight during a meeting between them and several of Marissa’s friends, is not just unusual for the series. It’s unprecedented, and it represents a kind of conversation that rarely appears on reality TV. It’s also more nuanced than a simple red-versus-blue disagreement, and it’s almost certainly influenced by the fact that they were filming in the pods on October 7, 2023. Season-seven participants came out of their newsless bubbles to a different world, as demonstrated by Ramses’s episode-eight reference to what’s happening in Palestine. That unique experience allows political discussion to become part of a relationship within Love Is Blind’s particular timeline — the impulse to respond to something happening now in a shifting world.

It’s an unprecedented conversation, yes, but it’s also a demonstration of something maybe even more fundamental about how relationships on this show play out. (And, frankly, about relationships more broadly.) Ramses and Marissa are deep into the weeds on an enormous, fraught topic about how they view patriotism and American life, but even at their most contentious, when Marissa explicitly describes how uncomfortable this conversation makes her feel, it’s clear this is not something that will drive them apart. For one, they don’t disagree all that much. Marissa’s no longer in the military, she has no intent to go back, and she dislikes the broader imperialist impacts of American military strategy. Ramses is very negative toward any military association whatsoever, but he doesn’t seem bothered by Marissa’s desire to talk about her career with their future children and to let them choose their own paths. The conversations in episodes seven and eight both end with something that looks like consensus. For them, their different perspectives have no active role in how they’re choosing to live their everyday lives.

What does have an impact, as least as it’s edited into episode nine, is something much more personal for them. Marissa doesn’t want to go back on birth control. Ramses doesn’t want to use a condom. They don’t want to have a baby right now. Where does that leave them? Even though Ramses and Marissa’s relationship has an element of political conflict on a global scale, the real tension lies in the stuff that shapes the more intimate daily choices they have to make. They have not been together long enough for either to have experienced a dramatic shift in their political outlooks from when they first met, and they have enough of a baseline from their time in the pods to ensure that their current perspectives are roughly compatible. They can shelve their differences on the inherent imperialism of American military strategy; it’s harder to move past their disagreement about how to not get pregnant. It’s a pattern for relationships on Love Is Blind — the things that break them are the quotidian, intimate, everyday-life things — that has a real ring of truth outside of a weird, highly constructed, producer-prompted reality setting. Until the political reality is connected with an unmistakable, unignorable physical reality for people’s lives, it’s rarely going to have more sway in a relationship than all the innumerable, mundane things that keep them together or drive them apart.