TO DATE, I HAVE SEEN EVERY SEASON of Netflix’s Love Is Blind, a dating series in which attractive, sometimes deeply unhinged people spend ten days speaking to other attractive, sometimes deeply unhinged people through a wall, in the hopes that their inability to see each other will allow them to develop “real” feelings. These “real” feelings—unsullied by contestants’ usual tendencies to choose their paramours by height, or facial symmetry, or ass size—then ideally lead, as such stirrings are so often encouraged to do, to the ultimate prize of heterosexual marriage. Technically, I am what might be described as a “devoted viewer” of Love Is Blind, and yet I have to admit that what I feel toward the show is not really devotion but a grim sense of duty—bordering, perhaps, on masochism. Earlier this year, season eight was released, and this time what had once seemed airily mindless had deflated into total, striking flatness. The daters were all visually similar enough that it became impossible to tell them apart, and the interests they bonded over (“Taco Bell,” “faith,” “family”) were just as eerily uniform and bland. Above all else, nearly everyone involved seemed to have gamified their banter, subtly manipulating each other in ways that did not quite resemble the outsize strategizing so often seen in reality television, but something more quotidian and depressing—namely, the way real-life dating is described to me by an alarming number of my straight, single friends.
Heterocentric romance, on- and off-screen, is in dire need of a new image. Thank God, then, for the British journalist, broadcaster, and essayist Shon Faye, whose new memoir-cum-manifesto, Love in Exile, is a clever, funny, and astute look at love—the love that exists between men and women, yes, but also queer love, platonic love, maternal love, religious faith, friendship, and many other forms of love besides. A trans woman who dates men, Faye describes herself as having taken to traditional romantic love with the zeal of the newly converted. Its seductive invitation to perform the role of the pursued, wooed, and supplicating babe, she suggests, so closely mirrored her experience of transitioning in a frequently transphobic culture that the goal of finding love and the desire to be embraced as a woman linked themselves in her mind. (“She is [her male lover’s] muse, his baby, his mistress, his groupie. She creates an unhinged fantasy and lives in it,” she writes, in an amusing riff about the current patron saint of women who eroticize bad men, Lana Del Rey. “It’s all very transsexual.”) All hetero-adjacent women, cis or trans, have at one time or another found themselves tasked with being smaller, sweeter, and easier-going for the sake of so-called romance, and many of these women, too, have been disappointed by life’s failure to live up to the dream they were once promised by an old-fashioned media fantasy of love. “The two belief systems that have most influenced my ideas about love, while simultaneously causing me the most pain,” Faye concludes, are “first, the belief that love is instinctive, simple and transformative . . . and secondly, that happiness in love is achieved within heteronormativity.”
What she proposes is, therefore, a major reimagining—a shucking off of the familiar in favor of the unknown, making love harder to monetize and wider in its scope. Love in Exile seeks to restore what has been stripped away from our conception of romance by dead-eyed shows like Love Is Blind: a vitality that, crucially, does not spring from a desire to be immolated by the experience of love, but comes from the possibility of being energized and even radicalized by it. The “burning insanity” that we have been conditioned to expect—even to hope for—from our love lives, seeing pain as a prerequisite for passion, is per Faye an impediment to connection, leading women in particular to adopt the abnegated poses of martyrdom (albeit sexily) in order to accommodate the needs of their partner. “Our appreciation of love,” she points out, “is bound up in politics—though in love, as elsewhere, the politics is usually naturalized, rendered invisible.” In Love in Exile, politics are just as front and center as emotion, and yet somehow the book remains deftly undidactic; warm and curious, it is every bit as interested in suggesting a new way to live as it is in denouncing the failures of the present. Especially persuasive is Faye’s championing of platonic love in friendship and community as an alternative to the now-commodified and thoroughly codified version of romance that is sold to us as a candy-coated opiate of the masses. Friendship, she suggests, “is of very little benefit to capital . . . an elective relationship entered into only for the purposes of mutual affirmation and pleasure, it is an affront to productivity.”
While reading Love in Exile, I thought often about a comment that Faye posted on her Instagram account, in which a nameless man speculated that the book would be too “niche” by virtue of its author being trans. One has to wonder whether such a person is committed full-time to reading only work by those who share his gender, sexual orientation, and apparent deficit of empathy and imagination. Regardless, Faye blends the strictly personal with the broadly universal just as seamlessly as if there were no space between the two. The effect of this approach on the reader, if it isn’t too grandiose to say, is a little like the pull of love itself—a state that feels both private and singular, and epic in its scale. Love in Exile has been out in Britain, where I live, since February, and since its release I’ve seen passages from it on social media almost daily, each time with a caption suggesting that the reader sees themselves in the text. Funnily enough, I rarely come across the same excerpt twice. What is most ironic about characterizing Love in Exile’s outlook as “niche” is that framing the experiences of others in this manner runs entirely contra to the spirit of the book, which argues for community and an expansion of the boundaries of care. To be interested in another person because they are your mirror is to shrink your world entirely. It is how you end up marrying someone on TV because you both eat Taco Bell.
Ultimately, the best reason I can give you to read Love in Exile is that in addition to being beautifully written, it is also beautifully, almost unfashionably earnest. There is something touching about how hesitant Faye appears to be when revealing the rawest aspects of her sexual, romantic, and familial history, and about the way she chooses to disclose this slight nervousness—if subtly or obliquely—in the text. In a different writer’s hands, such an undertone might have implied a bit of Lana-style martyrdom, and yet here, it merely feels as if she’s chosen to be generous. Setting aside earthly concerns, the book’s final chapter addresses a personal connection of a fairly different sort—specifically, the author’s connection to God, or at least to an ambient God-force. A sincere bit of spiritual and philosophical musing, it presents Faye’s present-day faith as a natural extension of her interest in passion. Her initial introduction to religion came in childhood, growing up Catholic; as she came to feel self-conscious about her newly burgeoning desires around sex and gender, she became increasingly besotted with the idea of atoning for her “deviant” needs. “It feels terribly a la mode to describe myself as ‘spiritual, not religious’ [now],” she concedes, “but I suppose it’s accurate in so far as I have a sense of the sacred, and am motivated to commune with a divine power and a force beyond what I can see beyond the material world.” The last image in the book is of Faye kneeling to pray on a clifftop, feeling “the immanence of divinity and the nearness of love.”
It is telling that her paralleled experiences with religion and romantic love begin with a self-injurious longing to conform, then develop into something more nebulous and open. Love, for Faye, has never been about being completed by a him or a Him, after all, but about the pleasure of the search itself. In their very purest forms, the obsessive pursuit of love and the pursuit of God are symptomatic of the same desire—perhaps even of the same personality type, i.e., that of the artist, whose prerogative it is to seek out extremes of experience, and to recognize that trying to give a name to the unnameable can be a life’s work. Faye knows that her work is ongoing. “I have a body that still feels and a heart that still beats,” she concludes, taking stock, “and so, still, a future beyond.” That old convert’s zeal for love is evident in Love in Exile, but now it appears in a newly tempered form, characterized by cautious hope. If Love Is Blind, with its ever-increasing sameness and its mind games, can no longer provide a jaded viewer like myself with the same easy kicks, here is another, better story about breaching barriers to connect with something that cannot be seen, only felt. What does true romance look like? It might look like a square-jawed man and a woman with veneers exchanging pleasantries on Netflix, or like the hot subjugation of a video by Lana Del Rey. It might look like Valentine cards and chivalry and roses. Or else, it might look like a woman out alone on the edge of a rocky promontory, trying to break through a figurative wall with her love.
Philippa Snow is a critic and essayist who lives in England. She is the author of Trophy Lives (Mack, 2024) and Which As You Know Means Violence (Repeater, 2022).