With Netflix's Love Is Blind Season Three premiering on Wednesday 19th October, it’s time to meet the new cohort of hopefuls looking for love - and one thing fans can’t help but notice is the show seems to be bringing a whole lot more body diversity onto our screens.
The premise of Love Is Blind is simple. Viewers follows a bunch of questionable singletons as they blind date their fellow contestants, proposing to each other before the big reveal happens – and the question is raised whether love actually is blind.
It can’t be denied that it’s empowering to welcome real bodies onto our TV screens – after all, a 2020 study suggested that the average woman living in the UK wears a size 16. However, the dynamics that unfold between some of these women and their chosen partners is anything but empowering.
The show hasn’t made it to season three totally unscathed. Over previous years, audiences have criticised the series for not being diverse enough, and we’ve witnessed many a contestant hold it over their partner’s head that they’re not their ‘usual type.’
When Love Is Blind Season Two aired at the start of the year, viewers were happy to see the show had embraced some body diversity with its chosen singles. Both Chassidy and Hope were much-needed plus-size representation on the show – but they appeared only briefly before vanishing from the pods, never to be seen again.
The show paraded them as diversity, but it felt more like a feeble attempt to monopolise airtime.
And rather than meaningfully and positively showcasing body diversity, Love Is Blind has often been criticised for elevating weight-loss in some damaging ways.
In Season One, contestant Kelly Chase's storyline became totally centred around how she had lost weight, become a life coach, and completely turned her life around.
And in Season Two, controversial cast member Abhishek ‘Shake’ Chatterjee raised eyebrows after sharing that he was looking for a woman of a certain weight, asking fiancée Deepti “Will I have trouble picking you up?”
The show's host Vanessa Lachey – who co-hosts with her husband Nick Lachey – hit back at concerns the show wasn’t diverse enough by claiming some people were simply too self-conscious to make it out of their pods.
She said, “Their whole life they’ve been so insecure about being themselves because of this crazy swipe generation and catfishing world that we’re in that I wonder if they truly don’t have enough time in those two weeks to find themselves, and then be themselves to find that spouse.” Yikes.
Let’s be honest. Saying the problem is with the individual rather than the reaction of the system is never a good look – especially not from the show’s host. Vanessa’s comment regurgitates a tired stereotype that certain people just can’t love their bodies.
But body diversity isn’t just a problem with Love Is Blind – in fact, it spans across all of reality TV.
Married At First Sight UK fans were left shocked after business consultant Kwame openly admitted he “usually goes for someone more petite” than wife Kasia.
Love Island’s feeble attempts at body diversity saw them label contestants Anna Vakili and Alexandra Cane as “curvy” and “plus-size” – despite their beautiful bodies falling short of breaking the barrier.
And plus-sized models such as Jada Sezer have spoken out about turning down opportunities to appear on hit TV dating shows, previously telling Grazia how "It can't be that one person's sole responsibility to be body diverse on the show."
When it comes to Love Is Blind, it’s all well and good placing diverse bodies onto our screens – but if the show doesn’t positively champion and support them, then it simply isn’t enough. With this year’s cast looking more diverse than ever before, only time will tell whether the show embraces them or pushes them to the periphery.
Love may very well be blind – but it’s not always certain that the production team is…