16 surprising things you probably didn't know about Netflix's 'Love Is Blind'

Although the producers originally planned for the pods to be soundproof on just a few sides while allowing sound to pass through the light-up wall, they found that it made sound bleed from one pod to another.

To create total privacy for the contestants, they chose to make the entire pod soundproof and had the contestants communicate through speakers.

"We basically had a small speaker in the front wall and you would hear the other person who was in the other pod," co-creator and executive producer Chris Coelen told Variety in 2020. "There's no producers in there, there's nobody else. It's just you and the other person. That's it."

Coelen told Variety that the men can choose from "10 or 12 different styles and colors" of rings. They can also bring a ring from home if they want to.

He also said the women can propose on the show, too, though none have chosen that option yet.

Although the couples on "Love Is Blind" had only a short time (38 days, to be exact) to get to know each other, get engaged, and get married, they had to wait over a year to see their journey on TV and go public with their relationships.

In February 2020, "Love Is Blind" contestant Damian Powers told Refinery29 that the series wrapped filming in November of 2018.

This means that the contestants who ended up together have had to keep their marriages out of the public eye (in particular, off of social media) for over a year so they wouldn't spoil the show's ending.

Season two was filmed in 2021 and aired in 2022.

According to Coelen, contestants had much more input about their relationships than other, more over-produced reality dating shows. He said he wanted to give contestants the chance to control their experiences within the rules of the pods.

"[Contestants would] say, 'I'd love to have a dinner of lasagna with this person. So, we'd get them some lasagna," Coelen told Oprah magazine in 2020. "They could do whatever they wanted, other than to touch each other or see each other … We wanted them to make the decisions and them to control their destiny"

Contestants weren't given cue cards or specific talking points, either.

As Coelen told Variety, "They were never interrupted in terms of like a producer saying, 'Hey, talk about this, talk about that,' they just did what they wanted to do."

The premise of "Love Is Blind" is that the contestants cannot see each other, which means they cannot communicate outside of the pod.

So how did contestants end up in a pod with the person they'd like to see? Producers helped arrange dates.

"They got to pick the people they wanted to keep talking to, and vice versa. Assuming that person wanted to spend more time with them, we'd make sure they got to meet in the pods," Coelen told Oprah magazine in that same interview.

The original "Love Is Blind" cast started with around 40 to 50 contestants, Coelen told E! News in 2020.

Over the 10-day period spent in the pods, some of them were sent home, narrowing the pool down to about 20 to 25 individuals.

"It became evident as the process went on, from that big group of people, that there were some people that more people were gravitating towards than others," Coelen told E! News. "There was a certain point where we did a whittling down of people just to focus internally on the people who were really connecting, to allow them more time."

The series' producers and creators didn't expect "Love Is Blind" to have so much success with the couples. In fact, more couples got engaged than were able to be featured.

"As a producer, I was kind of nervous like, 'Is anybody actually gonna get engaged? Is anyone going to make it to the altar?' And, in the end, we actually had more couples get engaged than we were able to follow on the show," Coelen told Entertainment Weekly in 2020.

Coelen went on to say that eight couples actually got engaged on season one but only six were featured on the series.

According to People, two additional couples on season two got engaged but their stories weren't shown.

On a 2020 episode of "People Now," the show's hosts Nick and Vanessa Lachey said that contestants would say they look like certain celebrities in order to describe their appearance to the potential match behind the wall.

During the interview, Vanessa seemed to imply that some of the contestants' lookalike claims weren't always accurate.

Since couples could stay as long as they wanted in the pods, some dates turned into naps.

"People would say, 'I love to fall asleep in the pod with the person I'm talking to,'" Coelen told Oprah magazine in 2020. "They wanted to spend as much time as they possibly could just talking to that person."

In an interview with AV Club that same year, Coelen said that contestants would sometimes have to be told to take breaks to eat, go to the bathroom, do interviews, or sleep because they just didn't want to stop talking to their potential partner.

The editing of "Love Is Blind" makes it hard to establish how long the dates in the pods actually are.

However, Coelen confirmed that the lengths of the dates varied based on how far into the process the contestants were.

He explained to Entertainment Weekly in 2020, "They would [talk to] each other multiple times every day … so in the beginning, just because there were so many people we had to cycle through, they'd be short, like seven to 10 minutes. Then, as time went along, they'd be spending hours together, multiple times a day."

"Obviously they couldn't see each other and they couldn't touch each other. But other than that, they could do anything they wanted to do — we encouraged them to be creative," he told AV Club.

Coelen said that contestants could eat dinner, play games, paint, or whatever other activities they thought would make their date more personal.

Like many other reality shows, the "Love Is Blind" contestants were stripped of their cell phones and any other technology that would put them in contact with the outside world.

This was a key aspect of the show's premise, according to Coelen.

"In today's society, we've got all these ways to find love through dating apps and technology. Those things sort of counterintuitively have made people feel disposable. They've made people feel like it's all surface level," he told Variety in 2020. "So we thought, what if we took everybody's devices away, how could we get them to focus on connecting with other people? We did that through these pods."

During the experimental pod part of the show, the contestants weren't exactly sleeping in luxurious quarters.

"We slept in trailers and they were correctional-facility beds. The design was to just strip us down from our comfort level," one of the season-one contestants, Kenny Barnes, told Refinery29 in 2020.

Cast member Lauren Speed told Oprah magazine in 2020 that her experience on the show created a sort of "sisterhood" between her and her fellow castmates.

"You'd think that people would be catty because some people would like the same guy. But we actually formed a sisterhood, no lie," she said. "We bonded through this once-in-a-lifetime experience. How else would we explain this to other people? No one else would understand. We all shared that, and it created a family."

Her castmate, Mark Cuevas, said the same was true for the men's side, calling it a "frat house, but a little more emotional."

A rep from Kinetic Connect, which produces the show, told Insider's Anneta Konstantinides that couples need to have a limited guest list for their weddings.

"They have to pick 12-15 guests that they want," the representative said. "And they give them a heads up because, obviously if they're engaged, most of these folks do at least walk down the aisle. Whether they say yes or no, we all find out together, but they want their friends and family there. So they have their guest list they provide to us."

The representative also told Insider that every guest has to sign an appearance release and they can't bring their phones to the wedding.

This is to help prevent spoilers before the series drops on Netflix.