Whose Youth Pastor Has a Side Gig at Netflix?

By S. J. Gul 

“I would like a diamond ring on my wedding finger 

I would like a big, shiny diamond 

That I could wave around and talk and talk about it” 

Every couple of months, it feels like Netflix drops a new bizarre dating show created by people who have never had sex, have simultaneously somehow been through five of the messiest divorces known to mankind, and yet possess a view of love solely informed by Disney movies. I feel like I’m being held hostage by a youth pastor who skimmed Deleuze in a coffee shop and went wild with it.  

These shows tend to follow the same format: Contestants genuinely think they’re about to be on a raunchy dating show, only to be blindsided by a Foucauldian nightmare cone from “Factory, China”, silently surveilling the contestants throughout the villa as they are forced into a celibacy retreat. Maybe I just wanted to describe Too Hot to Handle, but the vast majority of these shows involve (a) the tiniest swimwear I’ve ever seen, (b) copious amounts of alcohol, and (c) explicit moral instruction as to what constitutes a good relationship (read: culminating in marriage, 2.5 children, and a designer pug).

And we love it! With several international spin-offs, we’ve encountered moments that have been seared into our skulls. From a contestant not knowing what language her own tattoo is in, fondly reminiscing about how a frat party where a girl broke her neck from falling off a roof, to not knowing where Australia is (this is all the same contestant, and only in the first episode at that - Haley, the woman you are).  

In the age of situationships, dating app fatigue, and young people turning to matchmakers out of sheer exhaustion, the fantasy becomes obvious. Get out the stocks and your rotten produce! Let us punish the hot people for having meaningless drunk encounters with each other! Why can’t they want committed relationships with people like you? 

The guy with the mullet may never want you back, and you can't punish him for letting you abandon your dignity by triple-texting him after 3 vodka crans - but the hot people on your TV can be forced to sit down together, finger-paint, and talk in circles about self-actualisation.   

Some may argue that this is situated in a uniquely Western dilemma (particularly some incel with a Greek statue in their profile picture arguing that this is the outcome of Weimar Republic-level decadence and it’s all the fault of women having access to birth control). That reading falls apart the second you look at how so many versions of Love Is Blind exist, and my Arab father has provided me with his personal commentary on Love Is Blind, Habibi.

Sidenote: There is something painfully funny about the show presenting its concept as novel in a Middle Eastern context when so many Arab grandmothers also did not see how their husbands looked until the day they were married - and they didn't need a Netflix production team to do it. 

The abject failure of shows like Indian Matchmaking and Jewish Matchmaking to actually make matches only illustrates this more clearly. Only one couple from the multiple seasons of Indian Matchmaking actually got married, with little contribution from the glorious Auntie Sima, and they divorced within a year amid reports of domestic violence (ET Online, 2023).  

These shows lean into inflammatory narratives, inviting viewers to turn to their friends and say, “Why are women like that?” or “Ugh, men.” You get the unlikeable over-successful career women who are framed as too picky. You get men demanding supermodel wives while their hairlines sprint away from them at the speed of Sha’Carri Richardson.  

I don’t mean to be overly frivolous here because there’s an interesting underlying tension between clashing ideals of compatibility. Some people treat a match as someone who mirrors them, someone with an impressive career wanting a peer who understands ambition. Others treat a match as someone who fills in the spots they leave blank. There isn’t really an explicit acknowledgement of this rather gendered expectation (women tend to want peerdom, men tend to want someone more complementary) - well, no acknowledgement beyond Sima Auntie telling every man, woman, and dog to lower their expectations and Aleeza of Jewish Matchmaking likewise instructing the singles to “date ‘em till you hate ‘em!” 

In an era where so many people feel disillusioned about relationships, these shows give viewers the hope that there is something out there that transcends the often shallow interactions people have on dating apps. Someone could be surrounded by hot Instagram models and still be faithful to you. That they could fall in love before first sight.  

And it also results in the sweet schadenfreude for cynics in seeing these comedically shallow relationships crumble and collapse. It provides a voyeuristic perspective of relationships that allows us to minimise our own worries by comparing them to someone else's. Your girlfriend may still be hung up on her ex-humiliationship, but at least she’s not having a threesome on Netflix after announcing her loyalty to you. It’s so bad out there, doesn't your mediocre partner, who never gets you flowers, look so much better in comparison?  

While it is an open secret that repeat offenders like Harry Jowsey, who seem to be a permanent fixture on set, might not be falling in love like a Disney princess, this does not mean their emotions are fake. These shows project romance as a series of replicable steps and keywords shaped by the show’s incentives rather than as a private relationship. These shows reward accelerated intimacy and an unrealistic amount of emotional literacy. Imagine if you had to explain every move you made around your crush to a production crew for the cutaway to your confessional. Yet the feelings themselves can still be real. Under conditions of isolation, alcohol, and being deprived of distractions (on most sets, cast members don’t have access to their phones, books, or any other reprieve from what’s going on), emotions are heightened, making it possible to experience genuine vulnerability within an exaggerated romantic form. It may be disproportionate and slightly ridiculous, but it doesn’t mean it’s not real. In fact, acting slightly ridiculously is a well-known sign of being authentically in love. 

While we may have never seen someone get stood up at the altar like in Love is Blind, we’ve all seen our friend (or been the friend!) whose boyfriend clearly doesn’t like them as much as they want him to.  

In Chanté Joseph’s article, “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarassing?”, it argues that there's been an increasing cultural shift wherein women conceal the identities of their boyfriends (Joseph, 2025). A tacit acknowledgement that “boyfriend-land” is where individuality goes to die as you merge your identity with another person.  

However, she highlights that while women may be concealing the identity of their boyfriends, they still post some form of soft launch - faces hiding between flowers or a strategic phone placement in a mirror selfie.  

The cultural fixation can be summarised like so - people want to centre existing in a relationship but not necessarily their partners - the clout of having a socially approved relationship with the partner themselves being replaceable. Being in a relationship has benefits, but your partner is human and therefore has the capacity to be a liability that could embarrass you. In the words of renowned social theorist (Carpenter, Sabrina), "heartbreak is one thing, my ego's another". 

When (not if) he does something humiliating, you can claim you were never that serious anyway. These Netflix shows have gamified this paranoia; every episode of Temptation Island is structured around "wait until you see what they did when you weren't watching." There's nothing more mortifying than having to archive old posts, scrubbing evidence of an ex. Your parents could just stop seeing each other; you must perform a digital murder of your own relationship while 400 people watch. Even so, you can never kill it completely - someone will screenshot your soft launch, and it's floating in a group chat you'll never see. Someone will ask about your ex at a party, and you’ll mentally draft a PR statement.  

At first, I thought this was a result of a particularly curated social bubble. I wouldn’t be surprised by my friends’ conscious efforts to decenter romantic love. I am, however, an anthropology student with dyed hair, combat boots, and a tendency to wear pomegranate jewellery. My social circle is not representative of the cultural zeitgeist.  

 I think on the right, this situation is flipped in a mirror image. It's trad wife, not trad situationship! Forget meet-cutes in bookstores, and that ambiguous phase between friendship and romance that is both nostalgic and infuriating - Find Someone, Get Married, and Have A Socially Approved Relationship - in that order. 

In both cases, it's decentering your individual partner from being a soulmate to being a placeholder romantic object. Both treat the actual human as interchangeable - what matters is the relationship as proof of concept. 

This fixation makes sense in a world where stable jobs, affordable housing, and long-term security feel increasingly fictional. When material fairness collapses, romance becomes one of the last arenas where people still expect meritocracy. The bank may never approve of your loan to buy a too-small flat, but you don’t need a good credit score for your parents to approve of your future spouse.  

No one owes you a living, but surely you are owed love! Specifically, a love made legible and “proven” through a piece of paper.  

But even then, there’s been increasing cynicism. 

While Netflix shows conveniently stop at the altar - with a total of 14 couples saying "I do" across the U.S. seasons of Love is Blind, and eight of those couples remain together as of late 2025, and an announced engagement on Perfect Match (which conveniently disintegrated after the premiere of the show).  

I’ve recently been watching Couples Therapy on Showtime and in every comment section, you have at least one person praising the Gods that be, that they are single and not in a relationship like that. While the relationships pictured are ridiculously fraught, there’s something more authentic to them than the regular Netflix fare. The show regularly features middle-aged couples struggling to cope with finances, infidelity and trauma. It’s not as sexy; It’s still spectacle - with their beige background and therapist with a face that has subtitles. But there’s a glimpse of hope there; couples grappling with the roots of their issues stemming from childhood. It’s painfully earnest and sincere and therefore cringeworthy.  

There’s a queer polyamorous couple engaging in a “conscious decoupling” that asks if they can send pictures of their cat when they are meant to not contact each other for two weeks.  

There’s a couple who struggle with intimacy in an interreligious relationship because of an in-law repeatedly evoking demonic imagery to describe their relationship.  

Of course, we don't want those relationships. We want a nice engagement and then a fade-to-black where everyone presumes we're living forever in the last five minutes of a rom-com. 

I’m not saying that reality TV shows can exist as the frontier for showing us what dating should look like. But in a world where dating seems more fraught than ever for Gen Z, it’s interesting how the same shows provide different narratives: whether that’s inculcating puritanical abstinence until marriage, echoing the same message as most immigrant parents after you turn 25, “Don’t get a boyfriend, get a husband!” or encouraging a total divestment from relationships, accepting a certain heterofatalist mediocrity, maybe marriage has always sucked.  

Maybe the real show isn’t on Netflix at all. It’s in the way we perform love for each other, for strangers, for algorithms, and for ourselves. We swipe, soft-launch and situationship our way into romantic risk aversion. We want a version of love where we can guarantee that the person you love will not hurt you because you will see the red flags a mile away. But a love that can be fully optimised is not intimacy. It is risk management. And until you find a consulting firm willing to take that on – and I give it 5 years till an LSE grad proposes just that – this does not make for marriage material.  

But whatever it is, this isn’t your sign to redownload Hinge.  

References 

ET Online. (2023, August 23). Indian Matchmaking star Pradhyuman Maloo faces domestic violence allegations. The Economic Times; Economic Times. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/new-updates/indian-matchmaking-star-pradhyuman-maloo-faces-domestic-violence-allegations/articleshow/102994179.cms?from=mdr 

Joseph, C. (2025, October 29). Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now? Vogue. https://www.vogue.com/article/is-having-a-boyfriend-embarrassing-now