Folks, consider this your warning:
You’re about to be subjected to a really, really bad take.
Along with her husband, Nick, Vanessa Lachey is host of the wildly popular Netflix dating show Love Is Blind.
The series has earned praise for its unique approach to pairing up potential partners, focusing, as it does, more on emotional connection than physical attraction.
For viewers, LiB can feel an oasis of depth and actual humanity on a reality TV landscape that’s mostly given over to superficial nonsense.
So you can imagine the surprise of fans when Vanessa spewed some serious foolishness when asked about the show’s lack of body diversity.
If you’ve seen the show, then you know that contestants start out in “pods,” and they don’t lay eyes on their partners until after they decide to pop the question.
But that premise isn’t nearly as zany as Vanessa’s explanation for why the contestants who make it to the engagement round all seem to share similar body types.
“Their whole life they’ve been so insecure about being themselves because of this crazy swipe generation that we are in and this catfishing world that we’re in, that they’re so afraid to be themselves,” Vanessa told Insider when asked why we don’t see more plus-size people on the show.
“I wonder if they truly don’t have enough time in those two weeks to find themselves, A, and then be themselves to then find that spouse,” she continued.
Yes, Vanessa thinks all larger people are insecure, and conventionally “fit” people don’t need to “find themselves.”
Maybe she meant to make a less asinine point, but she just didn’t explain herself very well.
Whatever the case, a better answer would have been something along the lines of “we should cast a more wide array of people, so that the finalists might be more representative of the general population.”
Look, pretty much every dating show has this problem, so maybe it was unfair to put Vanessa on the spot like that.
But the fact is, The Bachelor is never gonna change, while Love Is Blind is a newer and much more progressive show — so fans might have been hoping for a more insightful answer from Vanessa.
As for other ways that the show might introduce greater diversity, Vanessa pointed out that doing an LGBTQ+ season would force producers to contend with some new logistical challenges.
“If you think about if you did just women, then it wouldn’t be separate quarters, it would just be one big house of everybody out for themselves, I guess,” she said.
“And if you did the men, it would be the same.”
Eh, this is the same show that convinced Netflix to build an underground Singles City and pay for the weddings of people who just met like two weeks earlier.
We’re sure they can figure out some way to address the logistical hurdles of an LGBTQ+ season.
And in the meantime, they should probably discourage Vanessa from doing any more interviews.
Vanessa Lachey: Bigger People Don’t Do Well on Love Is Blind Because They’re … was originally published on The Hollywood Gossip .