Netflix keeps insisting their new series Love is Blind is more than reality programming – it is a scientific experiment. We as an audience are simply allowed to observe as the experiment’s contestants/test subjects (conventionally attractive men and women who have job titles like “content creator” and “business owner”) are placed in cozy upholstered “pods” and forced into conversation with potential mates they cannot see. They are only let out once marriage is proposed and accepted, and after a quick reveal of what their life partner actually looks like, the couples are swept away to a whole new series of sterile laboratory environments, like a resort getaway in “Mexico”, condos in Atlanta with all-white walls and furnishings, and a nondescript, nondenominational wedding venue.

It is an experiment designed to answer the eternal question: are straight people OK?

We might not like the answers we find, and like the other great experiments of our time, such as the Stanford Prison Experiment or the MKUltra mind control and LSD experiments funded by the CIA, if we accidentally end up creating another Unabomber, we will only have ourselves to blame.

And who better to guide us through this quandary about what role physical embodiment plays in the mystery we call love than boy band veal calf turned reality programming stud farm bull Nick Lachey, who has now married multiple women who have been bronzed, toned, contoured, highlighted, veneered, sculpted and denied caloric intake into the same bland but pleasing prettiness. They prance their marriage around the contestants, seemingly to prove to them the authentic blindness of their love. They would probably stay together even if Vanessa gained more than three pounds, I’m sure of it.

It is all unbearably heterosexual, without even the usual nod toward diversity like a cute lesbian couple in the background shyly holding hands or whatever. The only couple who made it all the way through the proposal process but ended things before the wedding day was broken up by the man’s confession of having had male sexual partners in the past. We next see the woman in a series of contemplative poses – staring out at the ocean alone, staring into the swimming pool alone, sitting in her enormous resort bed alone – before she decides she can’t live with this revelation and they both pack up their carry-on sized roller bags and disappear into separate airport shuttles.

Each contestant is in some way a victim of heterosexual indoctrination. Jessica falls in love with Barnett unseen while trapped in a pod, but she must sit and wait to see if he will propose to her (he won’t, and she’ll say yes to the next man who asks). Barnett struggles to express his emotions, seemingly because he’s not sure he actually has any. Lauren is under considerable pressure by her mother to marry and have children before her “eggs dry up”. Most of the women, despite the men’s inability to see them, show up in the pod with uncomfortable looking body-con dresses, heels, blow-outs and fake eyelashes.

Each subject is a portrait of the particular form of loneliness compulsory heterosexuality contains. While the men mostly speak of their search for a spouse as a quest to acquire the next prize in their quest for adulthood – saying things like, well, I have a house now so I guess it would be nice to have a wife to put in it – the women suffer from their lack of emotional intimacy and company that the romantic partner is supposed to provide. One woman in her 20s declares she doesn’t think she could survive if the wedding is called off, as she is unable to live through another romantic disappointment. One subject’s mother talks of the number of years her daughter has been “yearning” for a partner. One woman who travels a lot for work explains that “coming home is the worst part”, because it is always to an empty home.

Their lack of cynicism in this process would be refreshing if it weren’t so baldly sad. Told their whole lives by their society, family and social circles that marriage and family will complete them or fix them, each seems to have reached a point of desperation that leaves them open to manipulation and experimentation.

It does feel like an experiment, although like the Milgram experiment, the true data set seems to be something other than what they are actually telling the test subjects. Although here it isn’t whether people will willingly cause others pain simply because they’re told to. (Or is it?) Rather than proving whether or not “love is blind”, the true experiment is about forcing people into a more and more extreme form of heterosexuality to see if they are capable of breaking from a lifetime of conditioning.

Will you, as a man who been told your whole life it is important to your masculinity to be a good provider balk at taking on a joint bank account with a freeloader with a shopping habit and a five-figure student loan and habitual Sephora binge debt? Will you as a woman who has been told it is more important to be an object of desire than to feel your own desire take as a lifelong monogamous sexual partner a man you clearly are not attracted to?

The stimuli of the experiment are always the same. Each “romantic evening” includes red rose petals scattered on various flat surfaces. Each bachelor and bachelorette party is identical, with a stripper for the ladies and gambling and shots of whiskey for the men. Each wedding will be constructed from the same elements, with all of the women choosing form-fitting white frilly dresses from the same shop, the ceremonies following an established template, and each couple’s vows sounding basically like an echo of the couple that wed in the same room before them. The subjects are prevented from expressing any individual or original desire, need or impulse, deftly showing that in our heteronormative culture, acquiescence to the couple format is more important than the unique qualities of the people who make it up. Will the pressure to conform prove to be too much, forcing them to recognize their own humanity and individuality, freeing them from the heterosexual paradigm? Or will they strive to make their way through the impossible maze of dating and mating only to be rewarded with a small cube of cheese?

The final results are not yet in, but in the preview to the finale we do get a shot of a woman in white dress and veil running down a road screaming about how she “can’t do this”. Whoever this is ultimately revealed to be is clearly the only winner of the experiment. Good for her.