I’m not sure how much you learn about the human heart from the dating show Love Is Blind. Probably the most surprising thing about it is its conservatism, given that it has arrived quite late in the life-cycle of reality TV. The conceit is that participants each have to sit in their own individual dating pod, speed dating one another though screens. The first time they actually see each other is when one has already proposed marriage, the other accepted. They then go on “honeymoon” and everything, generally speaking, falls apart. Since filming started in 2018, only eight couples out of 23 across five US seasons have remained married.
The US edition first aired in February 2020, by which time one couple was already in an established marriage, which they had to conceal for a year to avoid spoilers. The franchise had a good pandemic: within four weeks of the premiere, Netflix reported that 30 million households had watched it. It’s been the runaway success of all their unscripted dramas: in 2022, only three shows – Ozark, Stranger Things and Cocomelon – spent more days in the streamer’s US top 10.
But it wasn’t just that Covid delivered a captive audience for what was immediately deemed a bingeworthy show. The whole experience – people sitting alone in pods, having micro-dates with someone they could hear but not see, in the same room but not really, 0 to 60 intimacy, disembodied – seemed to mimic the wider experience of dating at the time, when touch was not allowed but humans were still humans.
It feels fitting that the Swedish version should appear now, in 2024, when all those conditions have passed. Sweden, of course, never really did lockdown in the first place. But even without restrictions, it seems they’re just not very good at dating. According to Statistics Sweden, the country’s most common mode of living is single-occupancy households without children. The rest of the EU looks on, baffled. But is this because Swedes can’t find love – or because they can afford to pay their rent? Never mind – there are, it seems, enough Swedish people looking for a soulmate to fill a season of Love Is Blind.
While how much you can find out about love and lovers from a high-concept reality TV format is debatable, you can certainly find out a lot about the social expectations of romance. Love Is Blind: Japan was not recommissioned after the first season, because the emotions never went above the dramatic plimsoll line. The boat just never rocked. The headline was that no one was promiscuous enough, so there wasn’t the low-vis bed-hopping that made other versions so gripping. But, truthfully, that wasn’t the problem: rather, people were just too dignified, wearing their disappointments way too lightly and their anger like a secret shame. It was a lot more like life, in other words, and as such it was the connoisseurs’ dating show, the Fellini of confected love, but it didn’t do it for the mass audience.
Comparing Swedish and US contestants is like comparing a restaurant in Stockholm with another in Los Angeles. In one, you’d be courteously accommodated by straightforward people who understood you were there because you were hungry. In the other, you’d be asked five times whether you were having a great day before you’d sat down, then enjoined to have a great time and a great meal by someone who was crouching next to you in a joyful pantomime of servitude, while pointing to things on a menu you were quite capable of reading yourself. OK, it’s a long time since I’ve been in Los Angeles and I never went anywhere fancy, so I’m mainly talking about the experience of a burger restaurant. But you get the picture.
The accent in the US dating game is on enthusiasm and contagious self-maximisation, whereas in Sweden, it’s on sincerity and a certain poetic pragmatism. The Swedes bond over a love of interior design and dark nights of the soul. The Americans set each other alight whenever they find out their motivation and ambition are aligned. I don’t really get it, because they’re actually all made of pure motivation and pure ambition. It’s like bonding over having fingernails.
Shared interests do matter, but they have to be weird. Milton and Lydia are in the only surviving marriage from US season five. Their first meeting – in which he tells her what kind of microscope he has at home and she tells him about her favourite rock (she’s a geologist, he’s an engineer) – was a genuine goosebump moment. She wrote him off at first because he was five years younger than her. Shame, I thought, because you’d be surprised how few men want to talk about banded gneiss on a first date. But she came round and they seem to be making a success of things.
Rasmus and Krisse-Ly, meanwhile, found their kindred interest in interior design: she’s studying it, he likes it. Unbelievably, they ended up married on this basis, but I predict this to be more of a starter marriage. Krisse-Ly was projecting on to him like mad. After their first three-minute conversation, she decided he was much better at things than he let on. How do you know, though, Krisse? How do you know he’s not much worse at things than he lets on? After their first prolonged real-life encounter, he publicly struggled with whether he found her attractive, to massive opprobrium on the socials. Clearly, rocks are a good foundation for a lifelong union, furniture not so much.
The national differences in the way participants talk about sex, and conduct themselves around it, are incredibly marked. The US version, which has varied from season to season, echoes the trajectory of Big Brother in the UK. The sheer newness of the first season threw up a lot of originality, which the second tried to confect, but it just ended up with a lot of artifice and chaos, which was progressively fine-tuned by each subsequent series.
One through-line, though, is an openness and specificity about sex: what noises do you make, whether you’re great at cunnilingus. In this area, the Swedish version sounds almost Victorian. Participants will even go as far as to say intimacy is important to them. They ask each other rather shyly if they sleep naked or wear pyjamas. In one bold move, Karolina gives Lucas a pair of her knickers, after which it nearly kills him to reject her. But he does and the two events seem connected, like if she’s pinging her pants all over the place, she’s not really taking sex seriously enough.
In Love Is Blind: Brazil, meanwhile, the men celebrate having sex by going to their balconies and baying like wolves, which got their nation a reputation as the most sexist. I’m not sure that sexism really covers that, though. The howling summed up what nearly everyone objected to about Love Is Blind: Brazil – that the women were awesome and the men were disgusting pigs, a contrast so marked that a lot of people assumed it was scripted. Producers insisted it wasn’t. So blame the casting.
In Sweden, Sergio has rollercoaster emotions about Amanda, to whom – again, unbelievably – he ends up married. One minute, he was declaring to the other men he was going off to “masturbate like a …” (like a what, though?). The next, he was going off her because she tells him she was bullied at school for having scoliosis. “I think,” pronounces Milan, a fellow contestant, “that’s immature and mean and disgusting.” Swedish dating ends up looking like really hard work: you have to be very open about your feelings, but none of those feelings are allowed to be frivolous or bad. No wonder they’re all single.
It’s even more intensely heteronormative than Love Island, demanding a tunnel-visioned, fairytale certainty that will brook no nuance about anything. And, of course, the stakes are alarmingly high, with all participants expected to be ready to make the ultimate commitment on a dime. So it has the internal logic of a 1930s film or a Nevil Shute novel: wherever there’s a gentleman and a lady, both presentable and pure of heart and neither of them crazy, then why the hell shouldn’t they spend the rest of their lives together?
Yet,they’re all swimming in the waters of the 2020s, so sex has to be at the centre of their relationship goals, while at the same time physicality is allowed no place in the process of mate selection. How those conflicted decisions are reflected back at them, in the judgment of their audiences, is peculiarly revealing of wider social expectations and the state of that society.
So when Love Is Blind: UK drops later this year – presented by Emma and Matt Willis (she’s off Big Brother, he was in Busted and they’re married, which is the form) – we can expect our horrific national visage to be reflected back at us, while we all pile in to be mean to a bunch of kids just trying to get laid. That’s the hope, anyway.
