Lauren Speed Slammed Love Is Blind For "Cutting All The Black Women"
"How come they are always in the trailer but not the show…"
Lauren Speed and Cameron Hamilton are Love Is Blind royalty. After meeting, getting engaged, and getting married on Season 1 of the Netflix reality dating “experiment,” the couple became one of the show’s first and longest-running success stories. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they only have positive feelings about the series, and Lauren’s recent tweets criticizing Love Is Blind for not featuring Black women in Season 3 make that very clear.
Lauren and Cameron’s relationship on Love Is Blind was a milestone for representation in the reality dating world, as they were open about the realities of being an interracial couple in ways that many mainstream shows had not touched upon. But the series, in Lauren’s opinion, isn’t doing enough to provide platforms for Black women across the board. In a tweet on Oct. 24, Lauren wrote, “I don’t like how LIB be cutting all the black women. How come they are always in the trailer but not the show…”
Love Is Blind Season 3 debuted with its first four episodes on Oct. 19. In those episodes, viewers saw some contestants form connections, pair up, and move forward on the show. But others were merely hanging out in the background, barely shown during the pod portion of the season and then presumably dropped from the season after that. (And Lauren is correct; the trailer for the season indeed features a few women who were given very little screen time during the episodes that have been released.)
But according to Lauren, not forming a genuine emotional connection with someone doesn’t necessarily have to be grounds for elimination. “I know it’s slim pickings but about 85% of them couples be forced (just moving forward for entertainment purposes) anyway,” she wrote. “Y’all could at least force some more sisters to move forward throughout the show.”
She went on to note that entire couples can get engaged on the show but not be featured throughout the season. (For example, Season 2 co-stars Caitlin McKee and Joey Miller actually got engaged in the pods, but the show didn’t follow their journey after that.) In response to a fan asking why Black women weren’t heavily featured on the show, Lauren wrote, “It’s couples that get engaged that aren’t even shown sometimes. I think they only show what they deem most entertaining.”
This isn’t the first time Love Is Blind has been called out for its lack of representation. Earlier in 2022, series co-host Vanessa Lachey sparked debate when she spoke in an interview about why Love Is Blind doesn’t have much body diversity, citing “insecurity” in contestants who do not fit society’s typical beauty standards. "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," Lachey told Insider on July 25. This, naturally, received a ton of criticism from fans who called it a cop-out. “Y’all don’t feature diverse bodies because you don’t think curves will make good TV,” one Twitter user @mrsraejohnson wrote in response.
Clearly, not everyone is happy with the people featured — or, more accurately, not featured — on the show. Considering Love Is Blind is already renewed through Season 5, there’s still a chance for the show to make a change.
