Please, Men of ‘Love Is Blind,’ Please Just Stop Talking

What is a man on Love Is Blind to do? You volunteer to go on the most elaborate, time-consuming, and life-altering dating show on TV and suddenly you’re faced with a lot of impossible choices. The most impossible, and possibly the most important choice to make, is whether or not to lie. If you’re a guy like Andrew, you turn your dates in the pods into TED talks about transcendental sex that you may or may not have had and then use eyedrops to make yourself seem emotionally vulnerable. You try to lie your way into Netflix fame… and it doesn’t work. Proposal: denied.

Telling the truth is clearly the way to go, as the truth can make for a solid relationship as well as messy television — the two things Love Is Blind wants most. But some of the men who made it out of the pods with a fiancée have a very reckless idea of what “telling the truth” actually is. Basically, some men on Love Is Blind — men named Bartise and Cole — need to learn when and how to just stop talking. Cole and Bartise seem to not understand that there are levels to the truth and, even more shockingly, that metaphors are a thing. And y’know, sometimes a question is just rhetorical, my dudes! But these two just keep truthing themselves into corners and off of cliffs.

Let’s talk about Bartise, whose time in the pods was defined by dual relationships with fitness enthusiast Raven and the perpetually upbeat Nancy. Bartise bonded with Raven over fitness, but he and Nancy operated on a deeper emotional level. Bartise had to try with Raven and everything with Nancy felt right. So he went with Nancy, and things were going well until he met Raven IRL at the first couples’ mixer in Malibu. Afterwards, when Bartise and Nancy talk about the night, Nancy says that she wasn’t attracted to anyone else there. Bartise then excitedly tells Nancy about how hot Raven is, because in his mind, telling Nancy that Raven is a “smokeshow” and “hot as shit” is actually going to prove that he thinks love is totally blind. Nancy’s response to all of this:

This is what Bartise does over and over again: he thinks that living a life without any kind of lie is the most noble thing, and he takes it to ridiculous extremes. Like the moment he starts having doubts about Nancy and his physical connection, he completely shuts her out because to him, being affectionate to her at all would be lying to her… but mysteriously cutting back on affection and withholding how you feel about her is fine?

Bartise can’t stop himself from taking a rhetorical, metaphorical, hypothetical question and answering it as if he was under oath. When Bartise is asked by Nancy’s brother if he would still love Nancy if she gained 400 pounds, Bartise acts like this is a serious question and not just a way for Nancy’s brother to get you to admit that you will love his sister no matter what. You say “Yes” and move on! Instead we get a monologue, the gist of which is —

Christ, Bartise, stop talking.

Even worse than that? Bartise takes a conversation wherein he actually shut up and listened, his and Nancy’s talk about abortion, and then hoists it on his unsuspecting family. Dude, they just met Nancy. You have to know that your family is anti-choice — ! Just like how Bartise thinks that talking about how hot Raven is proves how strong his feelings are for Nancy, Bartise also thinks that this abortion story will demonstrate to his family how well he and his new fiancée navigate problems. Neither of these are the correct takeaways from either anecdote. Nancy is left wondering why Bartise even likes her in the first place, and his family is shocked by something that Nancy told Bartise in private (well, private until now). Bartise: if you’re gonna always tell the truth no matter what, you’ve gotta find truths that match your intent.

And then there’s Cole. Cole does not know how to answer… any question.

Zanab asks…

Obviously you say, “NO.” Cole responds…

When people at a pool party who you’ve literally just met IRL ask you how things are going with your fiancée, you say some variation of “fine” or maybe even “we’re getting there” and you move on because you probably shouldn’t say stuff to strangers that you haven’t said to your fiancée yet. Cole responds…

There is no “but, like”! Alexa says what we are all thinking:

And then Cole gets his version of the 400 lb. question: sometime during or after the pool party, Zanab asks Cole to rate her on a scale from 1 to 10 — which is clearly the kind of playful non-question that partners ask each other!!! Zanab is not asking for Cole to break down her physical attributes and compare them to the other girls like she’s a poodle at the Westminster Dog Show. She’s asking for the emotional truth from Cole, and that is 10/10. This is such an easy question to answer. Cole…?

And who does Cole think is a 10/10? “Maybe one person,” says Cole, and Zanab has to correct him: Colleen and Raven. What’s beyond insulting, though, is Cole’s defense.

Zanab should be grateful for her 9 because he usually gives women 7s. Those other two girls are, obviously, 10s — and one of them is the girl that he almost proposed to — but Zanab should be happy with her 9. God bless Zanab for not buying any of his paper thin excuses. Of course his excuse is that he has eyes and he’s always going to be attracted to women who are more attractive than Zanab, and he doubles down on thinking Colleen is attractive during his non-apology.

The thing is, neither Cole nor Bartise seem to know that being in a relationship means telling the truth, yes, but it also means respecting your partner and caring for their feelings. There are ways that Cole and Bartise could have gone about telling the truth in all of these scenarios — when it actually mattered and not in jokey hypothetical situations — without making their fiancées feel like shit. At the end of Episode 7, when the Cole/Colleen drama has been kicked up again and Cole is somehow trying to make Zanab into the villain, he asks if he should have lied to her. Zanab has the perfect response:

Men: telling the truth is good, but knowing when to just stop talking is great.