Love Is Blind‘s premise is sticking strangers inside massive pods to see if they can fall in love without knowing what their potential partner looks like. Because of this, it’s easy to assume that the purpose of the show is to prove that love actually is blind. However, series creator Chris Coelen confided not too long what the true meaning behind Love Is Blind is.

Chris Coelen opened up on what ‘Love Is Blind’ is really about

Love Is Blind has been bringing together hopeless romantics for seven, soon to be eight, seasons. Coelen first pitched the idea to Netflix in 2018, two years before it made its debut on the streaming service. He was inspired to make the show after noticing how difficult it is for couples to form a real connection in modern society. He felt technology especially made finding love difficult.

“When you have a conversation with someone, we tend to be distracted, checking our devices. If you’re on a dating app, you have so many choices that you’re constantly going to the next one, or you become focused on very superficial things, or people discount you for very superficial things. We all feel sort of disposable,” Coelen once said in an interview with Deadline.

The concept has worked for a few couples, but not all of them. There have even been instances in the franchise where some have been rejected by their partner after seeing them for the first time. But Coelen confided that these outliers don’t disprove the true premise behind Love Is Blind. He clarified that the show’s title isn’t an emphatic statement of its philosophy. Rather, it poses the question to both its participants and its viewers if love really is blind after all.

“In my mind, we never set out to prove that love is blind. That was never the intention. I think the idea of love being blind is sort of an ideal that many of us would like to believe is true,” Coelen said in an interview with Salon.

Coelen also once played around with the title so it was a closer match to the show’s message. But it seems changing the title around was one of a few ideas for the show he scrapped.

“It’s funny, when we were first designing the title card for the show we were like, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be fun to have the is sort of flip, like on a hinge? So it’s like, ‘Love is Blind/ Is Love Blind?’ Because that’s kind of the point of it being an experiment,” he said.

Additionally, Coelen asserted that the show truly tested its title when couples left the pods.

“The point isn’t that they get engaged, or [whether] they get married or not,” he added. “The actual question at the heart of the series is whether that feeling, that love that many people describe, is that enough to survive whatever the real world throws at them?”

What Chris Coelen tries to avoid when casting for ‘Love Is Blind’

Coelen has been candid about the show’s careful vetting process to ensure contestants’ expectations align with the show’s goals. But Coelen admitted that the vetting process isn’t infallible. Occasionally, contestants might slip through Love Is Blind who are more concerned with fame than romance. They were the types of people who Coelen did his best to identify quickly.

“Because it’s popular, there are people who say, ‘This is a way that I can get some visibility,’ for whatever reason,” he said. “We try to weed that out. You can’t completely discount it, right? But we try to gauge if somebody’s priority, if they found someone to fall in love with, that they would be interested in being married. Or are they more heavily weighted toward the idea of, ‘Oh, I’d like being on TV?’”

Coelen was adamant that those types of contestants were doing a disservice to everyone involved in Love Is Blind.

“By the way, we’re not always right. We’re human. We really try. . . . But when you’re in a situation where you know someone who’s come into Love Is Blind is serious about wanting to find love, and then somebody else somehow gets through and is just toying with them for that [exposure], that strikes me as really, really wrong and not fair to the participants,” he added.