I’m talking about Love is Blind. Don’t judge me.

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It’s been a few weeks since the Love is Blind craze swept social media, but it’s only recently that I decided to watch it for myself. I had just finished the latest season of On My Block (which was pretty disappointing, to be very honest), I couldn’t find anything else interesting to watch on Netflix, and a friend of mine said she had just started watching Love is Blind. So I decided to watch and react to it with her.

In brief, Love is Blind is basically a speed-dating “experiment” where men and women interact with each other without being able to see who they’re interacting with. By removing the element of “physical attraction,” the subjects are forced to form bonds solely off of communication and emotional connections, and could only see the person they’re talking to after they’ve proposed.

I’ve only seen 4 episodes so far, and I’m caught between the extremes of “Wow, love is such a magical, beautiful, inexplicable thing” and “This experiment is literally insane and everyone who participated needs a psychiatric evaluation.” However, one of the relationships I found interesting was the one between the lone Black couple, Carlton and Diamond.

Part of the reason that this relationship was interesting to me from the get-go was that Carlton was not being entirely forthcoming about his past — and so there was always an element of impending drama. Carlton admitted to the cameras that he has dated both men and women in the past, but he keeps his bisexuality a secret from Diamond…even after proposing to her and meeting her face-to-face.

During the couples vacations in Mexico, Carlton seems to struggle holding in his secret, which resulted in some really awkward banter and nervous sarcasm; Diamond shrewdly recognizes this as a sign that something is up. Carlton finally admits his secret to her on the first night, probably hoping for immediate support; instead, Diamond tells him she needs some time to process this information that he decided to drop on her a couple weeks away from their wedding date. The next day, by the pool, Diamond expressed her concern that Carlton was being dishonest from the very start; Carlton took offense, they exchanged harsh words (including Carlton calling Diamond a “bitch” at one point), and by the end of the discussion the engagement ring had been thrown across the pool. The relationship was over.

There seem to be a few forces at work that made their relationship such a complicated matter. There’s the issue of honesty, openness, especially in a setting where there’s limited time and no eye-to-eye communication in the dating stage. The audience can tell during their poolside convo that Diamond is a little peeved by Carlton not being 100% up-front with her, especially since honesty and genuineness seems to be one of the reasons their bond was so strong during the dating stage (“I kept it real with you since day one”). Diamond felt that, since Carlton waited until only a few weeks from their wedding to be honest about this very important part of his identity, he was merely gaming the system (“I feel like you kinda played the experiment in a way”). That might have justified her concerns about whether or not he could be trusted and whether or not the love was real. Carlton defended his choice to hide his bisexuality by saying that prejudice would have prevented their relationship from even moving past the first date.

Which brings us to the second factors: bi-ignorance and prejudice against the LGBTQ+ community. I am not bisexual, but I do know that the fears that Carlton expressed early on were valid. He stated that he had already been rejected in the past because of his sexuality. There are many heterosexual, cisgender people who carry stigmas — or at the very least, misconceptions — about bisexual men; Diamond was seemingly among those people, which she revealed when she asked him, “How do you know I’m the love of your life? Do you ever feel like you need to go date another man?” Her reaction read as someone who doubted a bisexual man’s ability to fully “commit” to one gender. Carlton insinuated that Diamond’s reaction was proof that she also wasn’t honest with him during the dating stage in regards to what he perceives as her ignorance of sexuality.

There’s a lot of other details that I won’t rehash here; I think you have to watch their conversations to really see how their relationship unfolds. I’m also not interested in picking sides because 1.) these are two very flawed people whose relationship spawned in already-doubtful conditions, and 2.) with all the high emotions and poor communication that took place during their poolside convos, it’s hard to say either of these two was completely in the right.

Carlton and Diamond’s relationship was an interesting, yet tragic arc in the show and I think it has provided enough evidence that a few days of communicating behind a separating wall is neither enough time nor optimum circumstances to get to genuinely know a person.