Love is Blind, Mamma Mia, and My Various Gender and Age-Related Crises

This season on Love is Blind, one Ilana will enter the pods, ready for love and willing to set all her priorities and personality aside. She’ll go on an incredible journey, and if she’s successful, will say ‘I do’ to the most mediocre man you have ever seen in your life. So, will we find out if love is truly blind?

I had, essentially, a full existential crisis the first time I tuned in to LIB. I was super late to the party, had already missed the boat on the first few seasons but was consistently intrigued by my friends’ Twitter (I will never call it X) threads chronicling reactions and memes. Catching up meant a constant barrage of texts to them, who probably were a little exasperated with me, as I inquired and commented on every aspect of a show they had watched two years prior. As I watched perfectly veneered individuals who took partners home to apartments that looked AI-generated (for the most part, shoutout to Danielle and her weird mascots though), my brain started to boggle and swim with the words “wife” and “husband.”

“So, what are you looking for in a wife?”

“A husband is supposed to…”

“A good wife–”

“I need a husband.”

I got stoned and I cried. And I thought about my grandparents, and my parents, and the men and women in my family I never got to know but that I have seen in faded pictures. 

I had phases growing up where I would not, under any circumstances, wear pants. Skirts only. And then I hated skirts, because it meant looking girly, and GIRLY IS BAD! Boys good, girls bad. And I did theater and I did sports, and I was mostly bad at all of it but I would throw my little body into every minute, I would make sure I was seen. I am 8. And then I shoplifted some makeup, and smeared my face with Maybelline Dream Matte Mousse and came downstairs and my mom called me a harlot (“you can’t look like that in synagogue!!!”) I am 10. And then in fifth grade a boy in the hallway wags his tongue at me, holding up two fingers in a V, and another girl giggles and tells me has a crush on me. And I start dieting, I drink the lemon cayenne water all day until I throw up. I am 12. And then I want to be strong again, so I do sports once more. I acquire bruises on my knees that I’m told 'makes it look like I was sucking dick all night.’ I am 13. I have C-cups by 8th grade and “DSLs” but I am ugly and so to ask me out is a prank, I cry alone in my room most nights. I know nothing of boys, and thank God I know nothing of men. I exist as a girl but looking back, I don’t remember being taught how to be a woman.

For as much as I saw patriarchy affect my family and the world around me, I do not recall ever hearing the words “a wife should” uttered in my presence. No one ever instilled in me the need or importance of a husband, or the laundry list of tired traits a woman is supposedly required to keep around her. Strong, protector, provider. The minute someone uses these phrases earnestly around me I have to suppress laughter. As someone who has been genuinely lucky to have men in my family that aren’t…all…completely terrible, and who, yeah I guess, protected and provided, this is so ridiculous to me. I’m grateful I escaped even this tiny bit of patriarchal indoctrination, but it has made me woefully ill-equipped to handle Love is Blind.

Because on Love is Blind, sad people make terrible decisions purely in the service of these platitudes they were raised on, that you need to have a husband that does x, y, z. That all these years of independence you’ve had were just fast times, and now that you are 25, 29, GOD FORBID 34, it is very much time to pack all that shit up!!! Bradley from Seattle wants a wife who cooks and cleans, and so you will learn to cook and clean. Lauren from Austin needs a husband who will cut off all his friends to soothe her insecurities, and so you will text your friends and say “hey, this woman I met two weeks ago is more important than all of you now, because don’t you know I need a wife? And this person wants to be a wife. So this will be my wife and this is my life now, I guess.” Until the reunion, of course, when it is revealed that Bradley had secretly met up with Ashley after the pods!! The scandal of it all. It is, of course, because he thinks she is hotter than the woman who so desperately wanted to be chosen and who forced herself into a wife-shaped box for him because that, my friends, is what a good wife–nay, a good woman does. These weren’t the names of any of the actual people on the show, by the way. Or maybe they were, they do tend to blur together at some point, don’t they?

So I’m sitting there on my living room floor in the apartment I I have always lived in alone, wondering what the actual fuck is going on. I am ridiculously sad. I would like to add a disclaimer that I have previously had such low self-worth that I kept a straight face and remained googly-eyed when a man cheating on his girlfriend with me told me that he was raised by his wonderful grandfather to treat your woman like a queen!! I am on no high horse right now. Maybe a miniature pony, though, by virtue of the immense and expensive therapy I have done to not hate myself so much that I accept it as valid when a man tells me that he doesn’t want to give me too many compliments, as that would be too intimate, and it would go to my head. I have been able to prevent myself from murdering my rapist, although the occasional fantasy of him driving off a cliff does help me sleep sometimes. I have had the misfortune of loving men and the eerie premonition that I might again one day, but I have never spent time gazing up at empty shelves in my home with placeholders on it for the husband, the one I am apparently required to have lest my life be lonely and full of misery, as if I frequently frolicked with joy every time a man told me that I had to keep the secret of his lust for me, because Ilana, no one can know that I liked you.

So I change the channel (streaming platform, who the fuck has channels anymore) and I remember the story of a beautiful woman who raised her beautiful daughter on an island with no help from men. A woman who has maintained, across time and distance, close friendships with her uni friends who used to sing with her. A woman who started her own business in a foreign country. LADIES AND GENTLEMAN, DONNA AND THE DYNAMOS!!!!

I love Mamma Mia more than words can describe, but I’ll try anyway! If you were unaware, I am actually the world’s leading Mamma Mia expert. This is a self-appointed title of course but I can prove it!! In 2019, my coworker Edwin informed me over lunch that 12 Pittsburgh area high schools would be performing Mamma Mia as their school musical, as the rights for production had been released that year and everyone wanted a break from The Drowsy Chaperone and Seussical. And he suggested, as what I wrongly assumed was a joke, that we should go to every single one of them, and then do…something with that experience. I agreed, as a joke. Only to get home that night to an invite to a Google calendar of every single Pittsburgh area high school production of Mamma Mia. Long story short, we watched 12 high school productions of Mamma Mia. I have also seen both movies more times than I can count, often soothing heartache and period cramps with the sounds of Swedish disco covered by James Bond.

Why do I love this story so much!! I will tell you, because I have thought about this extensively. After spiraling, wondering if in fact, a love will ever accept that I have no intention of existing as a checklist of wifely duties, I am reminded of the stories of women, older than I am, living a full life free from the circus of men. I could be Donna, weary but full of love for what I’ve made, and with memories of adventure and recklessness. With the most powerful pussy in the world by the way!!! Let me remind you that three men (one gay!) traveled across the world at one word from a woman they slept with 20 years prior. I could be Tanya, four times divorced, rich and hot and flirting with the pool boy. I could be Rosie, funky and funny, a cook and writer. I could actually live life. And love is not off-limits. Love can come when you least expect it, someone can see you for all of that life you’ve collected, all the bruises and trophies it has given you, and want you then and there. So maybe one day, a man that cheated on his girlfriend with you will come back and apologize and tell you there hasn’t been a day he hasn’t thought of you (for any friends reading, I cannot stress enough how much that is a JOKE!!!!) 

Mamma Mia teaches me that life does not, in fact, end if you are unmarried at 30, if you developed wrinkles or got Botox or ran a hotel or got divorced. Love is not out of reach for any of those reasons, and it might be possible to sit across from someone who isn’t gazing at you through the lens of “my grandfather taught me to treat my jilted bride like a queen, but only if she stays quiet and isn’t too loud and doesn’t cry because of what I do to her.” No one has given me their list of what their woman must be and I simply will never take one, to sit with and peruse and wonder how to be that person, purely to be able to say that I am someone’s. 

I am mine, now and always. At 27, at 77. Love is not, in fact, blind. She can see me for who I am when I scream and cry and when I drink wine out of the bottle, sitting on my kitchen counter in the dappled, dying sunlight. She holds me when I wake up sweating and screaming. Because love has always been women to me. Why is it so funny that a good man is one known as a protector and provider? Because it is women who have answered my panicked phone calls in the middle of the night, wondering if everything will be okay. Women that packed up my haunted apartments, delivering me to the light. Women that provided protection, almost always from men. Women that love me and whom I love. Love is not blind, it is the women I see performing Super Trouper with me in spangly jumpsuits when we are either gray or holding regular salon color appointments.