The women choose themselves on 'Love is Blind' Season 8

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Love Is Blind Season 8

Has anyone else noticed how impossible the men seem to be on this season of Love is Blind? On one hand, I suppose the lackluster male representation this season is nothing new; every cycle of this show has included a few Peter Pans and villainous losers. Still, there’s something different about this group of guys — something so obviously middling that it makes me want to shut down the dating pool in Minneapolis and reboot it in the hopes that its bachelors come back a little more eligible.

Thank god the women this season all knew enough to choose themselves at the altar during the Season 8 finale, leaving only one functional couple to say I do.

From Sara Carton finding out that Ben Mezzenga has no real opinions about Black Lives Matter to Virginia Miller asking Devin Buckley if they’d vote the same only for him to ask if that’d be a deal-breaker, this season’s relationships have, with a few exceptions, felt like an exercise in one-sided curiosity. While women like Carton and Miller and Lauren O’Brien came prepared to build deep, meaningful relationships, some of these men seem like they'd rather date an AI chatbot than a real woman with feelings, questions, and, heaven forbid, a personal history. This, more than anything else — meddling parents, debates over where to live, financial disagreements about appropriate sneaker budgets — became the wedge that drove couples apart.

It wasn’t just guys like Mason Horacek and Alex Brown, who never made it past the pods because neither seemed capable of forging an authentic bond. Carton and Mezzenga’s conversations frequently made me want to tear my hair out. There she was, asking him the kinds of “controversial” questions we all must ask before committing to a lifelong partnership — questions about his faith, his political beliefs, his willingness to change his habits to build a stronger foundation — and there he was, giving her absolutely nothing in return. Too often, it seemed he was gesturing at agreeability without offering the substance she so obviously craved.

Mezzenga didn’t know his church’s stance on LGBTQ rights and didn't even bother to look it up, even though Carton’s sister is gay. In the pods, he claimed he was ready to learn and grow and actually engage in political discussions, but once he and Carton got their phones back, he seemed more interested in taking mirror selfies than googling “George Floyd,” which was a point of discussion in their pod dates.

This isn’t the kind of relationship Carton explicitly said she craved, so when it came time to walk down the aisle, she gave him the only logical answer: “Today, I can’t.”

As Carton put it, she’s “always wanted a partner to be on the same wavelength,” and Mezzenga proved he was not. At the altar, he said that he wants to stay together and “keep growing our relationship if you’ll let me,” but Carton’s nervous chuckle said it all. Her obligatory “we’ll see — we’ll talk about that” did not sound promising. And who can blame her? As she put it, she wanted someone who’s interested in her mind, and in my observation, at least, Mezzenga seemed more frustrated than fascinated.

“I asked him about Black Lives Matter,” she told her family in the breakup van ride away from the venue, “and I’m no expert, but when I asked him about it, he’s like, ‘I guess I never really thought too much about it. That affected me. Especially in our own city, how could it not?”

From his church’s views to a talk about “the vaccine,” Carton said, “There was no curiosity coming from his side.”

While Mezzenga took the rejection in stride, Buckley seemed completely shocked that Miller said “no” — as did his family. Before the wedding, he told his family that he and Miller didn’t agree on everything, but that they’d worked through their differences.

“You can still make a marriage work and still have a happy relationship without completely agreeing on everything,” he said. “I’m just happy that we figured it out and now we can move on to focusing on getting married.”

“Now we can move on” feels telling. At least from what we saw, Miller didn’t seem settled at the end of their conversation about politics; she just seemed tired of digging for answers when all she got were evasive questions. Does she vote in alignment with her faith, he wanted to know? (She said yes but emphasized that she might express her faith differently than his conservative family.) Would she mind if they don’t vote the same way? After the wedding, Miller said it wasn’t their disagreements that made her hesitant at the altar; it was Buckley’s reluctance to dig deep.

It’s revealing that after the wedding, Buckley’s family was fuming over Miller’s decision, as though she’d done something to them personally. One family member could be heard saying, “I just don’t understand these girls.”

“I thought she was looking for a husband,” Buckley’s mother said. “How are you going to say you’re not ready when that’s what the whole experiment is for?”

For her part, Miller made clear what was lacking between her and Buckley — and she expressed some regret for how she tried to protect him during their relationship.

“There were topics he didn’t want to talk about,” she said. “Like politics … there was just depths of our relationship we didn’t get to. … Even our sexual relationship, we just didn’t get to it. I think we should be all the way there before we decide to spend the rest of our lives together.”

Miller also revealed that at one point, Buckley had received a check as a wedding present but never told her — further impeding her trust.

A lack of trust also sent O’Brien and Dave Bettenburg’s relationship up in flames earlier this season, when he just couldn’t wrap his head around her joining the show just after ending a friends-with-benefits situation. Rather than accept that O’Brien is a real human being with needs and desires, Bettenburg blew the whole thing out of proportion and acted like O’Brien had abandoned a husband to find a boyfriend on TV. Eventually, he broke up with her over it only to try and come crawling back at a cocktail mixer (but only after he’d tried and failed to convince his pod ex, Molly Mullaney, that the fallout was O’Brien’s fault). Fortunately, O’Brien made the same decision as Carton and Miller and chose her dignity over her man’s pride.

Monica Danús did not say “I don’t right now” to her fiancé, Joey Leveille, because of politics, she did turn him down because he wasn’t 100% sure about the relationship — another way of prioritizing her own needs instead of placating a prospective husband.

To be clear, I loved Danús and Leveille more than perhaps any couple in Love Is Blind history. I loved their goofy energy, their impassioned conversations about the virtues and pitfalls of sock bins and the way they seem to light up around one another. Given more time, I think they could have made this work (if they wanted to). But neither of them was there yet. They hadn’t said “I love you” before the altar, and Danús wasn’t sure how “into” her Leveille really was — partially because he’s less into physical affection than she is.

Rather than ignore it all and say yes, Danús went with her gut, setting both of them free to decide how they want their relationship to unfold in the long run. Leveille seemed as breezy about all of it as he did when he longboarded down the aisle, further confirming this was the right call.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen women on LIB “choose themselves.” In Season 2, Deepti Vempati announced she was doing as much when she said “I don’t” to Abishek “Shake” Chatterjee, who’d spent the entire season denigrating her and complaining that she reminded him of his aunt. That season also saw Natalie Lee giving Shayne Jansen the old heave-ho after a courtship that could euphemistically be described as "rocky."

In Season 4, Micha Lussier declined to answer first at the altar, instead prompting her fiancé, Paul Peden, to go first because she knew he’d reject her. And in Love Is Blind: UK, Demi Santana Brown told her fiancé, Ollie Sutherland, “I do not, for now” after a season of feeling insecure in their relationship. (The two ultimately broke up.)

In the end, only Taylor Haag and Daniel Hastings got married this season, leaving Season 8 one for five in terms of couples who actually got married after leaving the pods engaged. Until the men of Love Is Blind step up their game, this is what we all deserve.