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In this op-ed, Teen Vogue features director Brittney McNamara examines how the social media obsession with trad wives is creeping into Love Is Blind season 9.
After Love Is Blind premiered in 2020, creator Chris Coelen told Deadline that the show is a social experiment designed to strip away the superficial parts of dating in our current era, but also a way to examine where we are as a society.
"[I'm] always looking to tap into what big themes are, in terms of where we are, as a society or a culture,” he said.
Capturing where we are right now is messy and complex. Heterosexual dating among young people is in a fraught place, evidenced in survey findings that Gen Z is having less sex, and in the number of young people eschewing dating all together, and in the deepening political divides between young men and women. It's not just dating culture that's broken, it's our overall culture, chipped away at by hostile politicians, rampant misinformation, bigotry baked into law, and roiling unrest, all driving a wedge between us on deep, personal levels.
There's been a lot of chatter about season 9 of Love Is Blind online, including many “wtfs” and questions like “why does this feel so weird?” Some even called this season so far hard to watch. But if the show's mission is to reflect our culture, hard to watch seems about right. The show features a rising conservatism that we've witnessed over the past few seasons. But more than being simply a reiteration of the MAGA playbook, this season of Love Is Blind shows the many insidious ways that the regression to “traditional” values is creeping across our culture.
Past seasons of Love Is Blind have displayed a tension between the men craving a “traditional” wife and the women existing in a modern world complete with careers and aspirations outside the home — worldviews that we've now seen backed up by data. An April poll by NBC News found that men and women ages 18-29 had the biggest political differences of any age cohort polled, while other research suggests Gen-Z men are getting more conservative while Gen-Z women get more progressive. It makes sense that we'd see politics start to divide couples on the show. Sara Carton and Ben Mezzenga broke up thanks to a misalignment in their political and personal values, and numerous other couples on season 8 struggled with political differences — typically in which the women were more progressive than the men.
But in the most recent season, set in Denver, many of the women featured on the show also enforce strict gender roles, in which the woman is submissive or subservient to a dominant husband. Megan Walerius, better known by viewers as “Sparkle Megan," calls herself an “anomaly” because she's career-driven and successful, but wants traditional gender roles in her marriage.
“I kind of believe in more traditional gender roles,” Sparkle Megan tells Mike Brockway, a man she doesn't end up choosing. He says he's surprised because she's an entrepreneur, working on a wellness tech startup. “That's why I think I'm kind of an anomaly,” she replies. “Because, yes, I've had an amazing career but I also value the woman being that nurturer. I definitely want my man to be kind of ‘the provider’ — the security, the safety. There's something to be said about a man who's like, ‘yes, I want to take care of my woman.’"
And when coupled up with Anton Yarosh, Ali Lima discusses her role as a wife, which involves caring for her husband and future children, letting her husband be a provider. “When we have kids, I don't see any reason to bring children into the world and then pawn them off to a daycare,” she says in a discussion with Yarosh's mother about the importance of traditional values. “If you're wanting to start a family, I think the roles that we both want to play are important.”
In her initial introduction on the show, though, Lima, a nurse, says she was single because she hadn't “found somebody who has matched my ambition and drive.” Lima says on that show that she's about to return back to school, and she says she wants to keep a private bank account. It's not clear exactly how her career goals align with the vision she's laid out for her family life, similar to the contradiction Sparkle Megan faces in her desire for traditional gender roles while pressing the gas on her career.
It's not the first time we've seen couples discuss “traditional” gender roles onscreen. In season 5, Stacy Snyder and Izzy Zapata clashed over finances, particularly over Zapata wanting to split bills, including dinner. “Dinner's not 50/50. The man pays,” Snyder says. The couple broke up. And we've seen many examples of regressive behavior from the men on the show. So this season's buy-in to tradition from so many couples is maybe not surprising if you look at the cultural clues informing the show. Young women are increasingly fascinated with “trad wives” on social media, glorifying housework and, at times, demonizing women who remain in the workforce.
In an op-ed for Teen Vogue about how rising interest in trad wives predicted Trump's win among young people, Tia Levings, author and former trad wife, wrote about the increasing allure of “trad” lifestyles among young people.
“Images of women tending babies and men plowing fields have proliferated on social media in recent years, selling young people the idea that there’s freedom in returning to the past,” Levings wrote. “The promise is that, by abandoning career and money, young women can find true success and fulfillment by submitting to a patriarchal ideal that gives all the power to men. And men, of course, can retain the power they’ve always had, something many perceive to be waning in recent years. This, they posit, is how it should be.”
This power dynamic is the problem. There's nothing inherently wrong with aspiring to be a wife or a stay at home mom (an incredibly valid and difficult form of work). But what's alarming is the desire to cede power to men, returning to a lifestyle in which women were historically subjugated and repressed.
Another indicator of shifting societal values on the Love Is Blind screen was the conversation about LGBTQ+ kids between Nick Amato and Annie Lancaster. While they were in the pods, Amato asks Lancaster how she would feel if she had a kid who came out as LGBTQ+, to which Lancaster says, “I can’t tell you I would be the first person to be like ‘yay.’” Amato then asks Lancaster if she thinks young people identifying as LGBTQ+ is a “fad,” and she says yes.
"When kids start having those thoughts too young, and maybe I'm old fashioned, but it's like it's a concern for me because, 'Who is telling you that?'" Amato continues. (He did issue an apology after the episode aired.)
From “Don't Say Gay” laws to increasing assaults on trans youth's rights, LGBTQ people have been under attack, so this conversation on Love Is Blind isn't necessarily a surprise. But this does seem to be yet another indicator of this cohort's desire to stick to traditional family structure, one that's long excluded LGBTQ people.
This isn't even everything. It doesn't touch on Edmond Harvey's meltdown over his “nice guy” syndrome, a rant that felt overflowing with misogyny and the assumption of access to a woman's body. Or the racial dynamics between Patrick Suzuki and Kacie McIntosh.
Reality television doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's very much informed by the world around it and the values of our society at large. Of course, the cast is cherry picked, and not necessarily a full reflection of the city, region, or even larger group they're part of. And, many have pointed out how the show has long reinforced heteronormative ideas about dating. But it's undeniable that this season of Love Is Blind is a reflection of many parts of our culture right now, particularly the push toward “traditional” values that many think young people are particularly immune to.
Perhaps this season of Love Is Blind is weird or uncomfortable (and we haven't even reached the weddings yet), but maybe that's because we're not just watching a show about singles searching for the fast track to marriage, we're looking at a reflection of a society in which progress is rescinding and rights are being restricted. And yeah, that's hard to watch.
