"Ring Please"
Who should get the ring when you break off a reality TV engagement?
In its fourth season, Love Is Blind has matured to reality TV adolescence, or whatever you call it when enough seasons of a reality show have aired so subjects are familiar enough with the rules to break them. (The Seattle season filmed sometime in spring 2022, presumably after two seasons of the show have aired. Seasons two and three were shot consecutively, before season two aired.) Love Is Blind casts by city; for the first time, contestants don’t live in the season’s designated city, and couples must contemplate what it would be like to move. (Micah “splits time” between Seattle and Arizona, but definitely lives in Arizona; Kwame and Brett both live in Portland.) Tiffany fell asleep during a date. Zach ended his sight-unseen relationship with Irina to propose (cold, on a boat, where they could see each other) to Bliss.
When the teaser was released, I predicted Kwame and Chelsea would be the most chaotic Love Is Blind couple: her nails, his Cartier love bracelet, plus a certain … air … of swirltok. Nothing could’ve prepared me for Jackie and Marshall, the sleeper agents for drama and chaos. (Does anyone even remember their pod dates before Marshall puffed his chest at Josh for dating Jackie too?) By Mexico and their return to Seattle, we could see the contours of their relationship: Jackie was childish and inscrutable; Marshall was self-righteous and sort of patronizing, like he’d cast himself as the white teacher in an inner city school drama. He called her a “project!” She said she typically goes for someone tall, dark, and tatted, or basically Josh, the guy she’d rejected.
When their engagement ends, it’s like everything else in their relationship: a tense, bizarro non-confrontation. Jackie skips her wedding dress fitting to either see her new man, or to send a message that she’s not feeling it. (She’s disputed the show’s timeline of events.) Marshall comes in hot, with terse, impatient replies. They both seem as over the conversation as they are the relationship!
But I’m less interested in picking a villain than I am answering the biggest question I had: when a reality TV engagement is broken, who should get the ring?? Marshall asks Jackie for the ring back, saying he doesn’t think she deserves it. “Hmm,” she says. “Well I’m gonna keep the ring because I accepted it because I wanted to marry you.” My laugh reverberated through the neighborhood, I swear. Like, oh my goooooood, lmao.
I consulted Elaine Swann, an etiquette expert and former wedding coordinator:
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