Love Is Blind Season 5's Cast, Ranked

I never want a season like Houston's again.

Photo: Netflix.

There is no better reality dating show than Love Is Blind, where two dozen-ish single people sit in windowless Target-decorated rooms and Buzzfeed quiz their way into a quick marriage and inevitable divorce. The show’s participants can’t see one another until after they have gotten engaged, so all the turnoffs you’d notice on a first date don’t come until you’re already in the middle of planning a wedding. With its location-based casting, the show stumbles into some ethnographic research (meaning: of course the Dallas season was the craziest). 

Love Is Blind has few reliable archetypes: a white couple no one cares about, who instantly have no chemistry. A white woman and non-white man, and would you believe that this couple is obsessed with talking about how obsessed they are with their relationship. There’s a standard Aritzia shopper (she says, wearing some amazing Aritzia sweats rn) who unknowingly goes for a man who lacks common sense or a real job. There is, of course, a couple that is so diametrically opposed in every way and on every issue, and they fight non-stop, but refuse to express uncertainty. There’s a woman who wants her second choice pod partner but never talks about it; there’s a man who goes with his second choice pod partner and only talks about it. (And there’s one coupling that is honestly pretty boring and totally in love.)

Has the novelty of the experiment worn off? Season five, set in Houston, was rather downbeat. The season never got past the truly shocking revelation that two cast members, Uche and Lydia, dated before the pods. But that twist was so early in the season! There wasn’t enough story to sustain the six hours that followed. Only two relationships made it to the altar, after JP and Taylor broke up in Mexico. Carter and Renée made it out of the pods too, but their relationship played out offscreen. Carter was almost completely cut out of this season, and Renee was demoted to “Lydia’s friend” during the dress fittings. (I’ve seen it on Tiktok that Carter was accused of sexual assault, but that seems like a conflation of another contestant suing the production and her ex-fiance, alleging sexual assault. There’s also a rumor that Carter brought another woman to the couple’s shared apartment.) “I got a call a couple months before the show aired, in August, to let me know that our story wasn't going to be a big focus,” Renee told PopSugar. “What I was told was, ‘We'll just, point blank, say that Carter was awful and we don't want you to have to relive that. That's just not going to be a big focus.’” 

Here is my annual Love Is Blind ranking, and honestly I can’t believe I wasted so many hours on a season with so little drama. Maybe Stacy is ranked too high (emotionally inflexible people who don’t know how to do makeup ought to stick together). Maybe Johnie is too low. But frankly I just don’t want to think about these people beyond Sunday night, when the reunion airs and we’re talking about it in the Hung Up chat.

JP
You are not in your damn right mind if you are going to tell me how to dress or what makeup to wear. You are no Reynolds Woodcock! A man can ask if my blush is really blended, or admit that I’m wearing Miss Piggy lashes. A man should not get worked up, declaring what I look like should be his decision. Makeup-gate, as we saw it play out between JP and Taylor in Mexico, was the latter. 

JP gets ranked below Uche because at least Uche is upfront about being a bad guy. It took too long to learn that, in the words of that one TikTok, JP stands for Just Playing. And that type of hardo nationalism — American flags in every scene! — is nasty.

Uche
When Uche walked into the pods, he must have bumped his head and thought he woke up in that Oppenheimer interrogation office closet. Why else would he grill Aaliyah relentlessly on the five Ws of the infidelity in her last relationship and say that lying was the biggest dealbreaker in any relationship? All this, knowing good and damn well he was hiding his history with Lydia from her!