Love Is Blindsided
This article features spoilers through Love Is Blind Season 10, Episode 10.
If you are vying for the title of “biggest Love Is Blind villain ever,” you will need to work hard for the honor. Your competition at this point in the Netflix dating show’s run will include 10 seasons’ worth of cheaters and liars, clout chasers and schmoozers and players. You will contend with broad archetypes (the mean girl, the male feminist who isn’t, the promise-wielding commitment-phobe) and singular talents. Villain edits are reality-TV mainstays, and series’ appointed rogues are generally easy to spot from the outset. But Love Is Blind’s latest season, set in Ohio, has provided a cad for the ages: a guy whose bid for villainy was so sudden, so dramatic, that it doubled as a plot twist.
I am referring, of course, to Chris Fusco, the account executive and ice-plunge enthusiast who recently earned his place in the pannable pantheon by finding a creatively callous way to remind viewers of a harsh fact: Even when love is blind, it has its aesthetic standards.
Love Is Blind sells itself as a grand “social experiment” that simply happens to be televised. (Its participants do their dating through walls, to ensure they will fall in love “based on who they are on the inside.”) Early in the show, Chris connected with Jessica Barrett, an infectious-disease doctor who distinguished herself through her warmth, quirks, and humor. Chris, winning Jess over with an easygoing charm, wall-dated his way to an engagement: The two met in person, went on a group trip to Mexico, and were living together in an apartment provided by the show. Things had been going well, it seemed—great, even—when Chris dropped a “We need to talk” bomb: “Do you think we have a good physical connection?”
Jess did think their physical connection was good. She was seemingly unaware that Chris thought otherwise. She was definitely unaware of the source of his ambivalence: In “the normal world,” Chris told his fiancée, he was used to dating women who do Pilates. Or CrossFit. Every day. So.
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Never has a red flag been hoisted so quickly. Pheromones, sure, can be fickle; chemistry, as a romantic matter, is notoriously unscientific. But Chris’s ambivalence came with attribution. It was specific. And it was personal: An attraction “wasn’t there” for Chris because of something that Jessica, herself, wasn’t doing.
Villainy, at the elite level, will not content itself with offensiveness alone; the all-timers, the boundary-pushers, bring fresh nuance to their antics. Their insults—because they are hypocritical, perhaps, or ironic, or outrageous—are also interesting. Chris, in peak-villain mode, married technical proficiency with artistic flair: He managed to turn Pilates into a euphemism. Here was a guy who told his fiancée that he didn’t want to sound “like a fucking dickhead” but then also told her—what a flourish!—that he was attracted to Bri McNees, their fellow cast member and a former competitive cheerleader. Here was “It’s not you, it’s me,” shed of its meager generosity: “Actually, though, it’s you.”
Jess—whose daily routine involves caring for sick patients at the hospital where she works—met this performance, for the most part, with wide-eyed silence. (She instead made her feelings clear by promptly moving out of the apartment that she and Chris shared.) Love Is Blind’s audience, though, was more vocal. “This dude SUCCCCCCCKS,” one widely liked Instagram post announced. “Absolutely everyone hates him.” In a TikTok, a woman claiming to be Chris’s ex-girlfriend shared her assessment that Chris “thinks he’s God’s gift because he owns two pairs of designer sneakers.” Many people pointed out how beautiful Jess is, how manifestly attractive, how good, how fun, how kind. Some found Chris’s Instagram and mined it for evidence of what Chris had already made clear: Jess had dodged a bullet.
But if Chris is, as his alleged ex also claimed, “a walking red flag,” the label is all the more striking because he had spent so much of his Love Is Blind tenure in generally green-flag territory. Pilatesgate came at the end of Episode 8; the Chris who had appeared in the 7.75 episodes prior had epitomized the bland relatability that is Love Is Blind’s stock-in-trade. While he and Jess were in the dating phase—talking to each other and other romantic prospects through the walls of the show’s “pods”—he told her about his efforts “to be a better person” and his desire “to live in a better society.” He was also effusive in his admiration of Jess. He was quite smug, yes, about his daily ice-plunge practice; but this seemed, in light of everything else, a yellow flag at worst. Little about his storyline suggested that it would find him insulting his betrothed on international television.
Romantic pairings on Love Is Blind have their own character arcs. And this one, until its abrupt conclusion, had been presented as effective proof of the show’s concept: evidence of all that can be revealed romantically when people are invisible to each other. Jess and Chris bonded early over their shared love of animals (she had two bulldogs; he had a cat named Chalupa). They talked about hopes and insecurities and family and finances and the implications, if any, of their six-year age gap. (She was 38 at the time of filming; he was 32.) They bantered. They flirted. They professed mutual awe. Seeing Jess for the first time, Chris called her “perfect.” She called them both “the luckiest.” “He just makes me feel so safe,” she said. “I just know he’s never gonna let me down. I just know it.”
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This was, of course, an omen. And it foreshadowed more than the dissolution of their relationship. Pilatesgate was a pivot point for Chris as a character. (The show served up the Pilates scene with thudding, somber background music, situating it as an end-of-episode climax: a cliff-hanger with a marriage hanging in the balance.) The Chris who appears post-breakup is a sneering caricature of made-for-TV villainy. This Chris, out at a bar with assorted castmates in a group hang arranged by the show, drunkenly explains to anyone who will listen what he found to be lacking in his sexual relationship with Jess. This Chris brags about his history of dating gym-goers and ballet dancers. This Chris marks his breakup by going to a strip club and makes a point of posting a picture with one of the dancers on Instagram. This Chris informs Bri—whom he dated fairly seriously in the pods, and who got engaged to his show buddy Connor Spies—that her fiancé is too “submissive” for her. This Chris cackles. This Chris provokes. This Chris is “just being honest.”
“He’s a different person,” Bri marvels. She was not alone in such marvelings. Villain edits unsettle their shows’ storylines by bringing conflict and crisis, typically in ways that are melodramatic and thus immediately legible to viewers. Villain twists, though, unsettle the viewers. They expand the core questions of reality as a genre—what is real? what is manufactured?—into questions about the audience’s acuity: What did we miss? What was hidden?
Some people are born villains; others achieve villainy; others have villainy thrust upon them. And a well-executed plot twist tends to make people question everything that came before. The Chris who appeared post-Pilatesgate seemed to have emerged fully formed from the muck of the manosphere; the show offered few direct hints at the character he would become. So Love Is Blind’s villain twist dared viewers to go back and review the tape.
It is not unusual for people in relationships, however good they may be, to change their mind. It is not unusual for people who love each other to find “the physical aspect,” as the show calls it, lacking. Chris’s offense was not his change of heart; it was his change of character. It was You don’t do Pilates. It was his implication that the fault of the failed relationship fell to Jess—specifically, to her body. The text here offends, in large part, because of its subtext: the misogynistic assumption that it’s reasonable for a man to discard a woman, no matter how beautiful and successful and funny and kind, with a glib declaration that she is less than perfect.
Chris’s villain twist, in that sense, is a manipulation—an edit that Love Is Blind exploited for drama—that nonetheless captures something chillingly real. Misogyny rarely announces itself openly; instead, it very often emerges through small slights and insults. Villainy, even at extremes, can manifest similarly. It can reveal itself suddenly. Chris may be “one of the worst, most hateable reality TV show villains of all time.” He is also one of the most watchable—because his manufactured villainy rings true.
Love Is Blind, like the world of dating it claims to reflect, is fluent in the semaphores of romantic engagement: green flags, red flags, yellow, orange, beige. Chris—plucked, after all, from the real world—embodies a lesson that many daters have learned the hard way: Some of the most upsetting relationships feature characters who fly their green flag high, only to flip it, swiftly and shockingly, to red.