Why Relationships Matter

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Culture "social clock" pressures can heighten urgency, making participants more likely to commit quickly.

Accelerated intimacy through self-disclosure creates a powerful, albeit artificial, sense of closeness.

Novelty and heightened emotions can lead people to mistake physiological arousal for a genuine connection.

On paper, the idea sounds unusual, to say the least: 32 singles speed-date for 10 days in the hopes of finding their soulmate. There’s just one twist: They aren’t allowed to see each other’s faces.

And yet, this is the exact premise behind one of Netflix’s top-performing shows, "Love Is Blind."

While speed-dating itself has been around since the '90s, a potential looming engagement raises the stakes dramatically, which is perhaps what keeps audiences so hooked. But it also raises a thought-provoking question: How are these individuals able to fall in love so quickly?

As it turns out, various psychological explanations can help explain why—and how—these contestants become so willing to pop the question after just 240 hours of knowing each other.

The Role of Context and Societal Pressures

One could argue that luck is on the contestants’ side from the beginning. After all, they, theoretically, share common interests from the get-go: They’re not only all ready for marriage, but it’s likely that anyone going on such a show would possess similar traits like openness, adventurousness, and a tendency to place greater value on personality over appearance. (That said, questions have recently surfaced about the contestants’ intentions for going on the show, with some viewers wondering if some are simply there to raise their social media followings.)

Additionally, the social clock of one’s culture may play a role. Our social clock refers to a “culturally defined timeline for life milestones, such as marriage, childbirth, and starting the first job.” This social clock affects not only our behaviours but our perceptions of ourselves, too.

Thirty-year-old contestant Mike Gibney is a good example of this phenomenon. While the sales manager said that he was OK with the idea of motherhood being a “question mark” for his eventual fiancée, Emma Betsinger, his tune changed when the couple entered the second phase of the show, which involves living together in a shared condo.

“We got our phones back,” Mike explained in episode seven, “first thing I see—my best friend, he’s having a kid. And they just got married six months ago. My other best friend, he’s having a kid… I just want to know it’s part of my future. I want to have a family.”

Is it any coincidence that Mike experienced a heightened sense of urgency upon returning to the “real world”? No, according to research, since being “late” in achieving desirable life events is associated with increased psychological distress.

One could argue that even “everyday people” deal with the above phenomena, however. After all, how many 30-something singles can relate to the idea of feeling the social clock ticking and wanting to find a partner whose values align with theirs?

This is where "Love Is Blind" does its best work in manipulating its contestants, whether intentionally or not.

Here, we can turn to evidence from an interesting experiment conducted in 1997. In a laboratory setting, college students who didn’t know each other were paired together and partitioned into two groups: Group 1 was instructed to ask each other “small talk” questions, such as what their favourite holidays were. Conversely, Group 2 was tasked with asking each other 36 increasingly intimate questions, like, “When did you last cry in front of another person?” The study found that after approximately 45 minutes, participants in Group 2 reported significantly greater closeness than those engaging in small talk.

While these results might not be particularly surprising, consider how this affects Love Is Blind’s contestants. Confined to “pods,” as they’re called—isolated rooms where there’s nothing for a duo to do but talk—participants are seen engaging in deep conversations about topics that some of them say they’ve never discussed with anyone else. As contestant Victor St. John stated to his now-wife Christine Hamilton during his wedding vows, “You know more about me than anyone else on the planet at this moment.” As the aforementioned study concluded, reciprocal self-disclosure can influence people’s perception of closeness—even if, in reality, these contestants are missing so much information. In addition to not knowing what the other person looks like, none of the contestants have met each other’s families, seen each other in the “real world,” or even gone on a “normal” date by the time of the proposal. Nonetheless, many of them are equally convinced that they’ve reached a bond that they’ve never experienced outside of the show.

Why Relationships Matter

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Novelty and Attraction

Research shows that novelty and physiological arousal can also intensify romantic feelings. In other words, if our pulse is racing or our hands are sweaty due to fear or excitement, we are more likely to believe that those physiological markers are signs of romantic attraction. This phenomenon, known as the misattribution of arousal theory, may also partially explain why people who have never met in real life experience such high levels of attraction. Combine elements like competition, intense timelines, life-changing stakes, and the unfamiliarity of being on camera, and you create the perfect conditions for heightened physiological arousal. Amidst this charged mix of anxiety and excitement, conditions are ripe for people to misattribute their heightened sensations to romantic attraction.

And so, while many of us might not sign up to be a Love Is Blind contestant any time soon, the contestants’ rapid romances might be less perplexing than they first appear. Perhaps placing individuals who are already open to marriage in an environment that encourages deep self-disclosure makes connecting a heck of a lot easier. And perhaps adding elements like cameras and competitions adds to a state of physiological arousal, making it all too easy to mistake a racing heart for falling in love. In other words, love may not be blind; it might simply be situational.

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