Every time we watch Love Is Blind: Italy the question comes back promptly, almost annoyingly: but how is it possible to fall in love like this, without even seeing each other? The instinctive response is to dismiss everything as television, suggestion, naivety. Actually, if we get the capsules and Netflix out of the way, we discover something more uncomfortable: our brains are perfectly equipped to fall in love this way.
And no, it’s not a weakness. It’s just how we function.
When emotion comes before reason (and doesn’t ask for permission)
In the 1960s, the psychologist Robert Zajonc published on Journal of Personality and Social Psychology a study destined to become a milestone. His thesis is as simple as it is destabilizing: emotions can arise before conscious thought. Not only that: they are often born without conscious thought.
In other words, it is not true that we understand first and then feel. Very often the opposite happens. We listen, and only then do we construct an explanation that makes us feel comfortable.
In Love is blind this mechanism is put under a magnifying glass. People talk for hours, without distractions, without visual filters, without the need to “perform” through the body. The brain, deprived of the image, does what it does best: it latches onto emotions, words, the tone of voice, the feeling of familiarity. It’s not romance, it’s basic neuropsychology.
And when emotion comes first, it’s hard to convince her to step aside just because “rationally” it would be better to wait.
Because intensity always feels like love to us
Another landmark study, published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron in the seventies, shows something that we have all experienced at least once, even without knowing it: we tend to confuse emotional activation with attraction.
When we are agitated, vulnerable, emotional, our body is in a state of alert. The brain searches for a cause for this sensation. If there is a person in front of us, the answer often becomes: it’s him, it’s her.
Capsules work exactly like this. There is no normality, there is no boredom, there is no routine. Every conversation is filled with expectation. Every silence weighs. Every word counts. In such a context, emotional intensity is experienced as depth, even when it is above all amplification.
This doesn’t make the feelings fake. It makes them fragile, because they are linked to a very specific environment.
Familiarity that reassures (even if you don’t really know her)
Then there is another key element, less obvious but very powerful: familiarity. Social psychological studies have shown for decades that what is familiar to us automatically seems safer, more reliable, more “ours”.
In Love is blind something curious happens: familiarity is created without complete knowledge. Same voice, same ritual, same times, same space. The brain interprets this repetition as emotional stability. And stability, especially in an age of liquid and intermittent relationships, is incredibly seductive.
We don’t just fall in love with people. We fall in love with the feeling of feeling at home, even if that house was built in a few days.
Why do some people choose precisely such radical experiments
Here another line of research comes into play, published on Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in the nineties, which speaks of the need for cognitive closure. Very simply: not all of us tolerate emotional uncertainty in the same way.
There are those who manage to stay for months in “let’s see how it goes” and those who, however, experience it as continuous wear and tear. For these people, the indefinite is not romantic, it is tiring. Love is blind intercepts precisely this need: it offers boundaries, stages, a path. It promises an answer, albeit a risky one.
It’s not just a desire for love. It’s the desire to escape from ambiguity.
The Giovanni case: “malaise” or not?
At this point it is worth clarifying one thing, without pointing the finger at anyone. Love is blind: Italy often brings to the scene what, in everyday language, we call “malaise”. Not a pathology, not a moral judgment, but a way of being in the world that many immediately recognize. Malaise is that which comes on in intensity and goes out in normality, which lives very well as long as the emotion is high and the attention continues, and goes into difficulty when things become simple, everyday, unspectacular.
In contexts like this, where everything is amplified and every word seems definitive, this type of functioning can even seem effective. But then real life arrives, made up of long times and normal silences, and there the cracks emerge. Not out of malice, not out of strategy, but due to the difficulty – very common – of maintaining emotional continuity. It is a dynamic that the program makes visible several times, and which helps to understand why some stories, despite seeming very intense, struggle to survive outside the capsules.
The case of Giovanni Calvario, also told in the interview with Vanity Faircan be read in this key: as an imperfect example of this mechanism, not as its definitive explanation. More than defining a person, it shows a human limit that the format tends to amplify: the difficulty of sustaining, in everyday life, emotions born in extreme conditions.
It’s not the starting point, it’s a consequence. It serves to remind us that not all intense emotions are sustainable and that noticing them is not always malice or manipulation. Sometimes it’s just this: a human limitation that, put under the spotlight, makes more noise than normal.
The question that remains (and that concerns us all)
In the end, Love is blind it works because it stages something we also do outside of TV, just in a less concentrated way: we fall in love when the emotional conditions are right, not when we have all the information.
Psychology doesn’t tell us we’re naive. It tells us that we are consistent with our functioning. The problem isn’t falling in love blindly. It is demanding that what is born in an artificial emotional context automatically bears the weight of real life.
And this is perhaps why we watch the program with a mixture of fascination and annoyance: because, deep down, it doesn’t talk about them, it talks about us.
You might also be interested in:
