At this point, Love Is Blind has been around for long enough that we can have a conversation not just about the contestants, but about the hypothesis behind the show. Namely, the idea that people can fall in love based on getting to know each other without knowing what the other looks like, and that love will hold, even if once they do see each other, they discover they aren’t each other’s usual type physically. Enter Season 9’s Patrick Suzuki and Kacie McIntosh, and what their short relationship has evidenced about the issues behind this thesis and Love Is Blind in general.
On paper, one can argue that the show has proven its case. Love Is Blind doesn’t have a perfect record at matchmaking — what reality dating TV show does? — but it does feature some successful couples who have stood the test: two in Season 1, one in Season 3, three in Season 4, one in Seasons 6, 7 and 8. This shows that there’s some truth to the idea that emotional connection is more important than a physical one, or that it helps to establish one before the other.
But Netflix has done what it could to sure of it. There isn’t much in the way of body diversity when it comes to casting in Love Is Blind, and the show’s idea of body diversity is Alexa from Season 3. And she’s very much the exception that confirms the rule. And yes, the show at least attempts to cast different ethnicities, though we would be remiss not to say that it doesn’t even do that all that well. So, when people go into the pods, they are indeed talking to strangers. But they can be relatively sure they are talking to conventionally handsome enough strangers; the kind casting agents would have reached out to because they look good on Instagram. So, if they end up choosing the person on the other side of the pod, they probably won’t be too disappointed in how they look.
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Enter Patrick and Kacie. The thing about the two is that, unlike others who choose to go into the first meeting with zero information on how they look, Patrick and Kacie discussed race in their conversations in the pod. So, they already had an idea of what the other would look like, at least in that respect. And they chose to move ahead with that knowledge, getting engaged, and going ahead with the first meeting. And though that meeting was a little awkward, with Kacie kissing Patrick but not looking at him and walking out afterwards without looking back, like couples usually do, they still walked out of it as a couple.
But they didn’t make it to Mexico with the rest of the contestants. Instead, Love Is Blind showed them meeting up at the women’s hotel lobby, where Kacie told Patrick that she didn’t want to continue with the experiment. Before that, Kacie had told a producer on camera, “He deserves someone better than me.” If that were all she’d said, perhaps it wouldn’t have been that bad. However, she also told producers, “He’s not a bad-looking guy in any sense, but he deserves somebody that is so obsessed with him,” heavily implying that somebody wasn’t her. “I understand how that is about to look,” she added to the camera.
She’s not wrong. It looks exactly like that.
To add insult to injury, this is not what Kacie told Patrick during their conversation. When he point-blank asked if she was breaking up with him, she said she just didn’t want to go to Mexico. She also told him the conversation wasn’t happening because she wasn’t in love with him, but because she didn’t want to be on TV anymore. Very distinctly not what she’d said on camera. She also kept on making out with him. Can’t blame the guy for thinking this wasn’t a breakup.
Kacie even brought up how producers were trying to make this about his physical appearance, promising that wasn’t the case. There was no drama here, Kacie seemed to be saying. Just someone who wanted to date on her own terms, away from the show. And perhaps, that is truly what she believed at the time. Or maybe she realized how badly what she said on camera was going to look and did a complete 180. Either way, the Kacie who spoke to Patrick didn’t even sound like the same Kacie who talked to the camera about why she wanted to talk to Patrick — which is likely why Netflix made the decision to show her on-camera comments in the first place.
(In an interview with Netflix’s Tudum posted after Season 9 premiered, Kacie said, “[Patrick] did feel like more of a stranger to me. … If we had any shot of it actually working out, I needed to do it off camera and wanted to date him slowly at our pace at home in Denver. … It was hard. I remember being very emotional about it, and I felt bad.” She added, “He’s a handsome guy. It was more about him being a stranger in my arms than it was what he looks like.”)
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The whole thing just underscored how silly the premise has become when the system is as rigged as it is, and yet, how superficial the people Netflix keeps casting for these shows can still be, even while existing within a series of rules stacked in their favor to provide attractive matches no matter what. This is no longer just the exception, either. It’s the norm. Most people have just become better about not saying it to the camera.
Not Kacie. At least, not at first.
“I just unfortunately don’t think my attraction to him is going to grow that much,” she told the camera about Patrick. This is quite ironic, considering Kacie had more information about how Patrick would look than most contestants normally do going into their first meeting. “And it sucks. I just know it won’t. And I think it would be so unfair to him to have us go to Mexico, and then me have to, like, tell him there that I just don’t think I could get there with him, like, period.”
That part is already pretty bad. The part where no one bothered to tell Patrick he’d gotten dumped? That part is even worse. But for the show, it’s pretty much on par for the course. This is about drama. And about putting forward couples people can root for. Apparently, those couples have to follow certain aesthetic rules. Love might be blind, but reality TV is very much not.
The first 6 episodes of Love Is Blind Season 9 are available to stream on Netflix.
