Bars. Parties. Volleyball teams. Dating apps. For singles, the question of where people meet is vital.
“Am I really going to meet my wife in a grocery store?” asks Cole Barnett, a 27-year-old realtor and contestant on season 3 of Netflix dating show Love Is Blind. The assumed answer is no, regardless of how often he stalks the aisles of his local Trader Joe’s, eyeing the frozen Thai vegetable dumplings and fellow shoppers’ ring fingers.
That’s why, ostensibly, Cole and 29 other singles have opted to go looking for love not in a crowded club or bustling bookstore. Instead, they’ve headed into “pods” just big enough to hold a couch and all their expectations the person on the other side of a soothing, swirly blue wall is marriage material.
“There’s something about the pods that really just allows people to be incredibly vulnerable,” Love Is Blind Executive Producer Ally Simpson said.
The first four episodes of season 3 of Love Is Blind hit Netflix this week. For those who’ve managed to avoid the memes, the show places singles in their 20s and 30s into small rooms called pods, where they talk to each other for hours on end without actually seeing each other. Until they get engaged, that is.
The show explores whether people can fall in love without the usual hang-ups like age, height or weight getting in the way. (It helps that most of the cast qualifies as conventionally attractive.) After they do meet in person, the engaged couples spend time at a resort, living in shared apartments, and ideally make it to the altar. Since the show started in 2020, there have been four marriages, two of which have ended in divorce. But it all starts with dates in the pods.
Every octagonal pod has one of the aforementioned couches — gray and usually rounded or squared off — and a circular ottoman that sits on a long strip of dark red carpet (the red being a nod to love and romance). The walls are velvety looking, and the pillows are typically some mix of earthy browns and reds. Though you can’t see it on screen, each pod has snacks stashed away.
Simpson said there are two main goals in the pods’ design: They’ve got to be comfortable and they can’t be distracting.
“We want you to get in there and feel at home, feel like you’re on a date, and just be a comfortable place that you can settle into for a long, long time — they talk for hours and hours,” Simpson told me over the phone.
Some daters certainly do get comfortable. While most start out dressed in three-piece suits and silky semi-formal dresses, inevitably, they start going into the pods with athleisure clothes, hauling in their blankets and the signature golden metal goblets which have gone viral. Prim posture gives way to sitting on the floor or sprawling on the couch. Or, in the case of 29-year-old pilates instructor Raven Ross, jumping jacks.
Though the pods are furnished sparsely, the cast can ask the producers for anything from more elaborate themed dates to facial skincare masks to nachos. In the first batch of episodes this season,…
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