In the sixth episode of Love Is Blind season five, JP and Taylor — a couple that, at the outset, seemed fairly promising — split up after spending several awkward days together on their post-reveal honeymoon. The reason? They just weren’t compatible, a fact that became crystal clear when JP began complaining about his fiancé’s makeup choices.
“It felt like you were fake… You had a caked-on face, fake eyelashes,” he said of their first face-to-face encounter, noting that she got makeup “all over” his jacket. “When I first saw you and you had all that stuff on, I was like, ‘Is this gonna be like, an everyday thing? I’m gonna have to deal with you putting on a totally different face?’” he continued. “That’s not really what I want.”
Sure, JP’s brutal honesty might have been a good thing. Ultimately, it pushed both him and Taylor to part ways rather than drag things out. But JP’s aversion to his fiancé’s makeup is more than an irreconcilable personal preference — his comments reflect damaging cultural attitudes towards femininity, beauty, and deception.
While dating, appearance-based anxiety is a given. Everyone wants to look good in front of a potential partner, a desire fueled in part by fear of rejection. And most daters would agree: two people finding each other physically attractive is a promising indicator of their ultimate compatibility. Love Is Blind is meant to take looks-related bias out of the equation by proving that two people can fall in love — or at least agree to get engaged ridiculously, laughably quickly — without ever seeing each other.
But if JP is any indication, love is not blind, and appearance inevitably plays a role in our romantic choices. In his eyes, Taylor crossed a thin line that many women and femmes are forced to negotiate: Wear too much makeup, and they’re shallow or “fake,” as JP put it. But wear too little makeup (or perhaps eschew cosmetics all together), and they’ve let themselves go. In…
Read the full article here
