Attraction is Whatever Our Wounds Are Trying to Heal: Psychoanalyzing Love is Blind (Season 2)
*no spoilers for the finale
I don’t always watch reality TV dating shows, but when I do, it’s Love is Blind. It’s absurd, high-drama schadenfreude, but there’s also something very real about watching these imperfect people try to figure out the braintwister that is modern romance. The concept is simple: couples meet and get to know each other through a wall and may only see each other in person once they’ve proposed. If they’ve gotten engaged, sight unseen, they have a month (a month!) to get to the wedding day.
I got married in my mom’s backyard with a maternity dress I had bought online with a strict immediate-family-only policy and I was stressed. It was easy enough to fight with my partner whom I had known for 15 years in the month leading up to the wedding. But a literal stranger? Barely met their mom? Just finding out that they have corn and hot dog costumes just around at their apartment? This is some high anxiety stuff, right here.
As I argued back when the first season came out, I think this show is partly so popular because it’s a fantasy about not having to choose in an era where online dating involves literally thousands of options at our fingertips. We so badly want to be bound to someone, to have that decision made for us, but at the same time, we strain against those bonds, wanting to be free.
This remains true in the second season, though in many ways the anxiety feels higher. Everyone seems so unhappy all the time. As a friend pointed out while watching, “the straights are not all right.” So what, exactly, is going on here? Why does Mallory cry tears of joy when Sal serenades her but then seems to just not…like him very much? Why do we see so much of the whites of Shayne’s eyes, especially when he’s not doing very well at baseball? Does Shayne really think an Old Fashioned cocktail fountain could work? And what is with Jarette making tea from a pot in the gold wine glasses? You’re a grown man. Where is your kettle? Do you not have 800 mismatched mugs like the rest of us? I need answers.
The mystery at the heart of the show is what attracts us to people. But this is about more than just whether or not someone’s looks matter. Rather, it’s this: attraction is whatever our wounds are most trying to heal.
Let’s talk about Danielle. Danielle, the walking wounded, who (at least) knows she has self-esteem issues. Danielle, who says that if Nick rejects her, she “can’t blame him, honestly.” Whose tipsy mom tells her “You’re a lot! A lot to take!” which is unconscious parent-code for “I never understood you and your big feelings terrified me.” That is exactly who Nick is—easily overwhelmed by Danielle’s big feelings. This feels like home to Danielle.
Nick, for his part, has a mom who seems terrifying and says she thought he wasn’t “cut out for marriage.” There’s a big mood here that he’s already disappointed her before he even enters the room. Cue the abject sweating on the wedding day—he was dripping so hard he didn’t even tell Danielle how gorgeous she looked. Whether he says yes or no to Danielle, mommy is still going to look at him with those disapproving eyes. These two are perfect for each other: their mom wounds are exactly complementary.
The philosopher Alain de Botton has written,
We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. We are looking to re-create, within our adult relationships, the very feelings we knew so well in childhood and which were rarely limited to just tenderness and care. The love most of us will have tasted early on came entwined with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his or her anger, or of not feeling secure enough to communicate our trickier wishes.
Nick and Danielle have found something familiar about each other, but the familiar part is exactly the part that hurts the most. That’s why they keep fighting. If they are both invested in their own healing, their relationship might be exactly the thing they need to get over those old wounds, trust each other, and find a relationship that allows them both to grow. With a couples’ therapist, though, probably.
So our wounds want to be comfortable and familiar, sure, but they also want to heal. That means they like to be in situations where they get re-opened in the hope that someone can stitch them up properly this time. Let’s take Shake and Deepti as an example. Here’s a paraphrase of how their first conversation goes:
SHAKE: “What’s your name?”
DEEPTI: “Deepti.”
S: “Oh, you’re Indian! Me too. I only like blonde girls. So I thought I’d just be really super clear about that here on day one.”
D: “Ha! Ha!”
S: I only like small blonde girls I can pick up at a music festival. Could I put you on my shoulders if we were at a music festival? Like, would I have trouble picking you up?”
D: “……”
And these two go on to get engaged! I mean, we all laughed and thought that was the end of that, right? Nope. They meet again in the pods. It goes something like this:
D: “Did I ever tell you I lost a ton of weight? Like 80 pounds?”
S: How come no one else is asking superficial questions? I feel kind of embarrassed that I asked you about your weight but also like…I really want to know. I think that’s just who I am. I just again want to make super clear that I am extremely unlikely to be attracted to you physically. Like, extremely unlikely.”
Here is where Deepti’s inner wounds take over her body completely: “If I can make this guy love me despite him saying over and over again that he’s not interested, I will prove for once and for all that I am actually lovable.”
Now, I’m not judging Deepti for this. I have done this. I know what it feels like to pick the exact wrong person to help you get over your deepest insecurities. I know what it feels like to try so hard to be pretty enough or thin enough or cheerful enough to win over this person so that you no longer feel worthless inside. It’s terrible logic and it does not work, but this is what we do. It’s not because we’re stupid or there is something wrong with us (or our moms). It’s mostly because there is something wrong with our society. Women and feminine people are constantly being told we are not good enough and that we don’t have any power in this society. Trying to make unavailable partners love us is a misdirected way to try to get that power back. It’s digging through the trash for our misplaced self-esteem. It’s not there, guys.
Iyanna is doing this, too. The thing she fears the most is someone breaking her trust and abandoning her like her parents did when she was a child. So her selected mate is the one who almost proposed to someone else first. Iyanna’s wound figures that if she can get this person, this person who already almost rejected her, to stay wither forever, her fears of abandonment will go away. And Jarette is quite sweet and seems pretty sure about Iyanna, which likely confuses her, leading her to open every drawer in his house and look for evidence of infidelity. The wound both wants to heal itself and also to repeat itself at the very same time. This is not the way, as it turns out, to heal our deepest wounds.
Then there’s Shake. Shake does show moments of humanity and growth on the show. Perhaps partly because of his awesome mom who tells him Deepti deserves better than his superficial ass, he starts to question this problem he has. Deepti’s the best (and obviously gorgeous), but he’s not feeling that “animal attraction” towards her that he wants to feel. Let’s return to Alain de Botton here:
How logical, then, that we should as adults find ourselves rejecting certain candidates not because they are wrong but because they are a little too right—in the sense of seeming somehow excessively balanced, mature, understanding, and reliable—given that, in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign and unearnt. We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration.
We don’t know much about Shake’s previous blonde relationships, but we know he felt “animal attraction” and his mom seems to think he didn’t like them much. Deepti doesn’t poke at Shake’s wounded places. She’s very nice and emotionally balanced (and has way more patience with him than is warranted). How could he be attracted to someone who feels so comfortable and safe?
The famous couples therapist Esther Perel has argued that the source of attraction is the sort of mystery and uncertainty that often disappears in a secure, loving relationship. In her book Mating in Captivity, she writes,
My belief, reinforced by twenty years of practice, is that in the course of establishing security, many couples confuse love with merging. This mix-up is a bad omen for sex. To sustain an élan toward the other, there must be a synapse to cross. Eroticism requires separateness. In other words, eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other. In order to commune with the one we love, we must be able to tolerate this void and its pall of uncertainties.
This is part of the reason that constantly trying to please or subsume ourselves into the other doesn’t work very well. Erotic energy can be maintained in a relationship when we can keep an independent sense of ourselves outside of our relationship. Shake doesn’t have enough uncertainty with Deepti precisely because he trusts her and feels safe with her, and that dampens the erotic drive. Danielle and Nick, on the other hand, are so full of anxiety and uncertainty that Nick is walking around with a visible hickey. A hickey, you guys.
This is the look of a man thinking “Her mom is going to touch it. She’s actually going to touch it.”
Perhaps it’s this uncertainty that is driving our Natalie/Shayne/Shaina triangle. Now, this is a confusing one for me. Natalie seems like a very cool person with very nice parents (and Shaina is a creationist?). Natalie’s biggest problem with dating seemed to be that men fetishized her as an Asian woman and didn’t like it when she acted like a human being. The pods gave her control over her first impression and allowed her to get to know someone without them putting her in that particular category first.
But Shayne? What is it that she likes about this wild-eyed bro who thought she was Shaina for a minute and then backtracked horribly and refused to allow her to have a feeling about that? And what about Shaina, who agreed to marry Kyle despite his off-putting belief in evolution but then couldn’t stop thinking about Shayne because…he liked crop tops? They talked a lot about crop tops.
Here’s the thing about Shayne. His father passed away “a few months ago.” Grief dating is a thing—it’s a great way to get away from your feelings about the past and focus on the future. The problem with it is that we tend to get wrapped up in whatever makes us feel good and run with that without pausing to think about the consequences of our actions. Natalie and Shaina couldn’t be more different from each other, as least as far as I can tell, but Natalie was there and made Shayne not feel the bad feelings for a minute, so he’s running with that. Would have gone with the crop tops if Shaina had waved her handkerchief a little earlier. We’re also pretty sure Shayne is on cocaine, right? The wide eyes and aggressive energy that, like, wants to have “fun” but is also so offended that Natalie doesn’t “brag about our relationship” that he has to get up and leave the table? That’s gotta be cocaine, right?
This season of couples is a real mess. But that’s also what’s so beautiful about them. Everyone is trying to heal from something, and that’s what most human relationships are actually like. The good news is that working through healthy ways to heal our old wounds can help make us more healed and available for people who are also healed and available. The people on this show are not unique in their messiness. We like this show because it so clearly represents so many of us at one stage or another of our healing and dating journey.
I don’t believe that you have to love yourself before you can love someone else. I believe both things can (and should) be happening at the same time. Being in a practice of self-love, of attending to our oldest wounds, of re-parenting ourselves, of developing our sense of self on our own can help us show up to our relationships with something to give—and some intrigue that helps ignite that erotic spark. But other people can also help us love ourselves. Our partners can help show us how to love ourselves, and we can be in this practice together. Whatever happens to these human beings after this show, I hope they can find some good love inside themselves and let that be their guide, rather than following the whims of their wounds. And I also hope they get some therapy.
Have you read my take on LIB season one? It’s here: https://www.juliepeters.ca/readingnook/love-is-blind