You Have Seven Reasons to Watch the Newest Love Is Blind Season
Love Is Blind, a show messy enough to be a SZA song...
I was not in your inbox on Friday, but I have been playing on your phone! There are chats in the Substack app about The Traitors, the new White Lotus season, and the SNL 50th anniversary show.
It would never be so dire for me that I would need to fly to Los Angeles to cycle through a series of windowless cubbies spilling my guts to a complete stranger whose favorite movie is Inception or who has “Taco Bell” tattooed on the inside of their bottom lip. But I am so happy that it — dating, relationships, situationships, the prospect of marriage — is so dire for about a dozen other people. This is Love Is Blind season eight, set in Minneapolis. The best thing about this season, which premiered on Valentine’s Day, is that Minneapolis residents are called “Minneapolitans.” It goes downhill from there.
There’s not nearly enough material to justify six episodes in the pod — is there really a difference between a Daniel-Taylor date and a Monica-Joey date — but there’s some good material in these first episodes. An Instagram scandal, a white woman standing on business about Black Lives Matter, bi-curiousity, two love triangles, Meg’s whole thing. Usually I wait until after the weddings to rank the pod-people but I wanted to try something different this season since it is slower than most: these are the only seven people I care about.
After this first batch of episodes, the Hung Up LIB chat will be paywalled.
Madison
There’s no Bartise this season, but there’s definitely a Micah. Madison has dealt with a significant amount of childhood trauma from growing up with parents who struggled with addiction. She lays it all out early when she arrives to the pods. She forms a strong connection with Alex, a man who talks to her like she’s on a PIP; she has a strong-ish connection to Mason, who is easily talked into declaring his feelings for her prematurely. She quietly but firmly probes Mason about the depth of their connection (“I really think feelings have started to develop for you when it comes to me,” he says, a sentence I could diagram for the rest of the day and still not figure out how he arrived there). She starts a clock on their relationship — and his opportunity to declare his feelings for her — by reminding him immediately that she has to compare her connection with him to her connection with his competition.
That’s all fine, right, because they only get like four days of pod dating. But in her next conversation with Mason, Madison is so noncommittal to his affection that it seems like they’ve never spoken before. The conversation makes me want to crawl out of my skin and pluck each eyelash individually — she was doing all that just to get her backup man to put her first! In an otherwise slow season, at least Madison is compulsively watchable.
Lauren
Lauren didn’t just tolerate David’s melange of chirps and backhanded compliments, she enjoyed them! Almost imperceptibly over the course of the pod dates Lauren becomes insufferable: she glares at Molly (also talking to Dave) from across the womens ’s lounge room, huffing and puffing every time Molly gets excited going to or from a date with their shared man. (“Lauren thinks Molly is playing chess,” Hungie Madeline said in the LIB chat last week. “When really Molly is playing skee ball.”) This is Love Is Blind, a show messy enough to be a SZA song — girl get up. After Dave dumps Molly, Lauren embraces her like someone who got an A on a test and saw your paper get returned face down. “Where did he go? Did he go home?” she asks Molly knowing damn well Dave is waiting behind a wall with a hundred bad opinions about injectables and a ring to put on her finger. “You’re gonna either love this or hate this, but I honestly felt like I don’t know who’s more delulu,” Lauren says, referring to herself and Molly. “Me or her?” That sentence alone … sorry … I have to see how this story plays out. Lauren and Dave deserve one another.
The editor who made us listen to Devin’s Tylenol addiction story twice
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