Secrets of the Netflix ‘Love Is Blind’ Dating Pods

Bars. Events. Volleyball groups. Relationship apps. For singles, the query of the place individuals meet is essential. 

“Am I actually going to fulfill my spouse in a grocery retailer?” asks Cole Barnett, a 27-year-old realtor and contestant on season 3 of Netflix courting present Love Is Blind. The assumed reply isn’t any, no matter how typically he stalks the aisles of his native Dealer Joe’s, eyeing each the frozen Thai vegetable dumplings and different buyers’ ring fingers. 

That is why, ostensibly, Cole and 29 different singles have opted to go searching for love not in a crowded membership or bustling bookstore. As an alternative, they’ve headed into “pods” simply large enough to carry a sofa and all their expectations the particular person on the opposite aspect of a soothing, swirly blue wall is marriage materials.

“There’s one thing concerning the pods that actually simply permits individuals to be extremely susceptible,” Love Is Blind Government Producer Ally Simpson stated.

The primary 4 episodes of season 3 of Love Is Blind hit Netflix this week. For individuals who’ve managed to keep away from the memes, the present locations singles of their 20s and 30s into small rooms known as pods, the place they speak to one another for hours on finish with out truly seeing one another. Till they get engaged, that’s. 

The present explores whether or not individuals can fall in love with out the standard hang-ups like age, peak or weight getting in the way in which. (It helps that many of the solid qualifies as conventionally engaging.) After they do meet in particular person, the engaged {couples} spend time at a resort, dwelling in shared flats, and ideally make it to the altar. Because the present began in 2020, there have been 4 marriages, two of which have resulted in divorce. Nevertheless it all begins with dates within the pods.

Each octagonal pod has one of many aforementioned couches — grey and often rounded or squared off — and a round ottoman that sits on a protracted strip of darkish crimson carpet (the crimson being a nod to like and romance). The partitions are velvety wanting, and the pillows are sometimes some mixture of earthy browns and reds. Although you possibly can’t see it on display, every pod has snacks stashed away.

Simpson stated there are two predominant objectives within the pods’ design: They have to be snug they usually cannot be distracting. 

“We would like you to get in there and really feel at residence, really feel such as you’re on a date, and simply be a snug place that you may settle into for a protracted, very long time — they speak for hours and hours,” Simpson instructed me over the telephone. 

Some daters definitely do get snug. Whereas most begin out wearing three-piece fits and silky semi-formal clothes, inevitably, they begin going into the pods with athleisure garments, hauling of their blankets and the signature golden steel goblets which have gone viral. Prim posture offers strategy to sitting on the ground or sprawling on the sofa. Or, within the case of 29-year-old pilates teacher Raven Ross, leaping jacks.  

Although the pods are furnished sparsely, the solid can ask the producers for something from extra elaborate themed dates to facial skincare masks to nachos. Within the first batch of episodes this season, Ross brings in yoga balls for her and her date (and later an train band). There was a silent disco the place the solid may take heed to music with one another by way of headphones. Simpson even stated there was a beach-themed date together with seaside chairs that did not make the season’s ultimate minimize. 

“If you are going to marry somebody, you wish to know that you may have enjoyable with them,” Simpson stated. “You wish to know, Can we join over the music? When she will get her sushi, is she choosy about what sauce was there or wasn’t there? You wish to create these experiences to attempt to study as a lot as you possibly can about one another.”

Speak to the wall

The broader colour palette of the pods could be fairly mellow, however there is a notable brilliant streak of colour in each pod. The couches face a blue wall that type of glows and swirls. Simpson stated it is meant to represent the vitality of the particular person within the adjoining pod, to assist the daters really feel nearer and fewer like they’re merely listening to a voice piped in by way of a speaker from someplace else. She stated the present’s producers have hung out sitting, wanting on the wall themselves and asking themselves if it feels proper.

“If it was only a clean wall, you would possibly really feel such as you have been on their lonesome in that room,” Simpson stated. They landed on the wall’s blue tone as one thing that feels inviting with out being a distraction. 

When it comes time to suggest, principally, the {couples} stand up off the sofa and stand going through one another by way of that blue wall. 

As keen because the {couples} are to get out of the pods ultimately and, you already know, have a look at one another, for some, these pod conversations find yourself being the best a part of the connection. Season 1’s Mark Cuevas and Jessica Batten went by way of their share of tumult — partly as a result of Jessica was hung up on one other man from the pods — however in a final ditch effort to reconnect, Mark tried to re-create the pod expertise at their condo. 

The pair sat on reverse sides of a wall with candles, rose petals and fancy dinners, and as Simpson identified, that night time was the night time they lastly took the step of getting intercourse. 

“It may be scary to look somebody within the eye and to share one thing,” Simpson stated. “This simply makes you’re feeling secure, like ‘I am simply gonna put it out to the wall. I do know somebody is on the opposite aspect, however it looks like I am simply telling the wall.'”

Simply do not freak out when a voice from behind the wall asks you to marry it.