Netflix's new reality dating show "Love Is Blind" has quickly become one of the streaming network's most talked-about series.
Dubbing itself a "social experiment," the show features an equal number of male and female contestants who are looking to fall in love with someone for who they truly are, not what they look like.
The contestants go on dates in self-contained pods and they only get to see one another after getting engaged. Following an engagement, the couples are taken on a romantic trip to Mexico before getting married less than a month later.
Luckily for fans, "Love Is Blind" co-creator and executive producer Chris Coelen and a few cast members from the series have shared a number of behind-the-scenes secrets about the show.
Here are some things you probably didn't know about Netflix's "Love Is Blind."
Warning: Some minor spoilers for season one of "Love Is Blind" ahead.
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Although the couples on "Love Is Blind" had only a short time (38 days, to be exact) to get to know each other, get engaged, and get married, they had to wait over a year to see their journey on TV and go public with their relationships.
In February 2020, "Love Is Blind" contestant Damian Powers told Refinery29 that the series wrapped filming in November of 2018.
This means that the contestants who ended up together have had to keep their marriages out of the public eye (in particular, off of social media) for over a year so they wouldn't spoil the show's ending.
Although the producers originally planned for the pods to be soundproof on just a few sides while allowing sound to pass through the light-up wall, they found that it made sound bleed from one pod to another.
To create total privacy for the contestants, they chose to make the entire pod soundproof and had the contestants communicate through speakers.
"We basically had a small speaker in the front wall and you would hear the other person who was in the other pod," Coelen told Variety. "There's no producers in there, there's nobody else. It's just you and the other person. That's it."
According to Coelen, contestants had much more input about their relationships than other, more over-produced reality dating shows. He said he wanted to give contestants the chance to control their experiences within the rules of the pods.
"[Contestants would] say, 'I'd love to have a dinner of lasagna with this person. So, we'd get them some lasagna," Coelen told Oprah magazine. "They could do whatever they wanted, other than to touch each other or see each other … We wanted them to make the decisions and them to control their destiny"
Contestants weren't given cue cards or specific talking points, either.
As Coelen told Variety, "They were never interrupted in terms of like a producer saying, 'Hey, talk about this, talk about that,' they just did what they wanted to do."
The premise of "Love Is Blind" is that the contestants cannot see each other, which means they cannot communicate outside of the pod.
So how did contestants end up in a pod with the person they'd like to see? Producers helped arrange dates.
"They got to pick the people they wanted to keep talking to, and vice versa. Assuming that person wanted to spend more time with them, we'd make sure they got to meet in the pods," Coelen told Oprah magazine.
The series' producers and creators didn't expect "Love Is Blind" to have so much success with the couples. In fact, more couples got engaged than were able to be featured.
"As a producer, I was kind of nervous like, 'Is anybody actually gonna get engaged? Is anyone going to make it to the altar?' And, in the end, we actually had more couples get engaged than we were able to follow on the show," Coelen told Entertainment Weekly.
Coelen went on to say that eight couples actually got engaged at the end of the 10-day dating process via the pods. Only six were featured on the series.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Coelen said there are "lots of interesting stories" about couples that the show could not cover.
One story they did not cover, he said, is that of contestant Danielle Drouin, a yoga instructor and model, who got engaged to Rory Newbrough, a livestreamer.
The two split shortly after filming wrapped and then Drouin dated a different contestant from the show, Matt Thomas, the director of Brawl for a Cause, a charity-focused organization.
On an episode of "People Now," the show's hosts Nick and Vanessa Lachey said that contestants would say they look like certain celebrities in order to describe their appearance to the potential match behind the wall.
During the interview, Vanessa seemed to imply that some of the contestants' lookalike claims weren't always accurate.
Since couples could stay as long as they wanted in the pods, some dates turned into naps.
"People would say, 'I love to fall asleep in the pod with the person I'm talking to,'" Coelen told Oprah magazine. "They wanted to spend as much time as they possibly could just talking to that person."
In an interview with AV Club, Coelen said that contestants would sometimes have to be told to take breaks to eat, go to the bathroom, do interviews, or sleep because they just didn't want to stop talking to their potential partner.
Unlike other dating shows, where contestants are faced with the possibility of falling in love with someone from another part of the country, all of the contestants on "Love Is Blind" lived in Atlanta, Georgia, at the time of filming.
This especially came into play during the second half of the season when contestants got to see where their soon-to-be spouse is living.
Coelen told Variety, "We wanted people to all be living, currently in the same place. We wanted to give them a real shot at making their love and their marriage working."
The editing of "Love Is Blind" makes it hard to establish how long the dates in the pods actually are.
However, Coelen confirmed that the lengths of the dates varied based on how far into the process the contestants were.
He explained to Entertainment Weekly, "They would [talk to] each other multiple times every day … so in the beginning, just because there were so many people we had to cycle through, they'd be short, like seven to 10 minutes. Then, as time went along, they'd be spending hours together, multiple times a day."
Unlike other dating reality shows which feature a long list of rules about what contestants can and cannot do, the "Love Is Blind" creators and producers wanted contestants to get to know each other in as real a way as possible — aside from not seeing or touching one another, of course.
"Obviously they couldn't see each other and they couldn't touch each other. But other than that, they could do anything they wanted to do — we encouraged them to be creative," he told AV Club.
Coelen said that contestants could eat dinner, play games, paint, or whatever other activities they thought would make their date more personal.
Like many other reality shows, the "Love Is Blind" contestants were stripped of their cell phones and any other technology that would put them in contact with the outside world.
This was a key aspect of the show's premise, according to Coelen.
"In today's society, we've got all these ways to find love through dating apps and technology. Those things sort of counterintuitively have made people feel disposable. They've made people feel like it's all surface level," he told Variety. "So we thought, what if we took everybody's devices away, how could we get them to focus on connecting with other people? We did that through these pods."
Cast member Lauren Speed told Oprah magazine that her experience on the show created a sort of "sisterhood" between her and her fellow castmates.
"You'd think that people would be catty because some people would like the same guy. But we actually formed a sisterhood, no lie," she said. "We bonded through this once-in-a-lifetime experience. How else would we explain this to other people? No one else would understand. We all shared that, and it created a family."
Her castmate, Mark Cuevas, said the same was true for the men's side, calling it a "frat house, but a little more emotional."
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