What Love Is Blind Season 9 Reveals About Avoidant Attachment, Race, and Modern Dating

Let’s be honest—Love Is Blind has always been a little ridiculous. You’ve got people falling in love through a wall, proposing after ten days, and trying to merge lives before they even know how the other person takes their coffee. But still, every season pulls us in. Why? Because beneath the absurdity, it mirrors something we all crave—to be seen, to be chosen, to believe love can cut through the noise of modern dating.

Season 9, though, hit different. Not a single couple made it to “I do,” and while that might sound like another headline for the Love Is Blind hall of fame, what stood out to me wasn’t the failed engagements—it was how they unraveled.

As a Black woman married to an Asian man, I watched one particular love triangle—Patrick, Anna, and Kacie—with more investment than I expected. There was something quietly familiar about it. On the surface, it was about compatibility, but underneath, it revealed how avoidance and racial bias quietly shape who we allow ourselves to love—and who we convince ourselves we can’t.

Both women pulled away from Patrick, each defending their abrupt departures by saying they didn’t feel like his “one.” But the reasoning felt off. You can’t tell me you went on a dating show designed to make you talk to ten people in ten days and then suddenly feel betrayed that someone else caught feelings. That’s not about purity—it’s about protection. And what I saw in that protection was a classic deactivating behavior: that subtle emotional exit we make when closeness starts to feel too vulnerable, too complicated, or too risky to explain.

What Is a Deactivating Strategy?

In attachment theory, deactivating strategies are the behaviors people with avoidant attachment use to protect themselves from closeness. They’re mental escape routes that whisper, “This connection isn’t real,” or “They’re not right for me anyway,” long before we have to risk being seen.

Common examples include:

• Finding flaws in someone as soon as things start to feel too intimate.

• Convincing yourself the other person’s affection isn’t genuine.

• Comparing your connection to an idealized fantasy (“my soulmate wouldn’t do this”).

• Emotionally checking out before you can be rejected.
  
  

Anna and Kacie both did this in real time. They reframed Patrick’s openness as confusion, used his vulnerability against him, and took the fact that he had feelings for more than one person as proof that his love wasn’t pure. That’s how they made sense of walking away—not because Patrick wasn’t kind or consistent, but because closeness suddenly felt unsafe. But why didn’t they feel safe?

Avoidance, Race, and the Hierarchy of Desire

Here’s where it gets deeper: their avoidance didn’t happen in a vacuum.

Dating data has shown, again and again, that Asian men and Black women are the least messaged and least “liked” demographics on major dating apps. The algorithms reflect cultural bias—portraying Asian men as less masculine and Black women as less feminine or “too much.”  And the algorithm isn’t the problem here because it’s  just the messenger, responding to what we like to say yes and no to.

That hierarchy of attraction doesn’t disappear just because you’re in a pod—it’s part of the cultural air we breathe.

So when Patrick revealed his race, the energy shifted. Neither woman said it outright, but something in the dynamic changed. They didn’t reject him for being Asian; they intellectualized their retreat. And that’s what avoidance looks like when it’s shaped by bias—discomfort masked as moral reasoning.
“It’s not that I’m uncomfortable; it’s just that this connection isn’t right.”

The Flip Side: When You’re the One Being Deactivated

For many single women of color, this scene isn’t new—it’s familiar.

If you’ve ever been in a relationship where someone started to withdraw right when things got close, you’ve felt this. The long pauses in conversation, the overthinking, the sudden shift from consistency to confusion.

Avoidant partners crave connection but fear dependence. They might disappear after a deep moment, nitpick before things get serious, or keep you at arm’s length under the guise of “needing space.” And if you’ve been socialized to be the strong one—independent, unbothered—you might mirror that same energy. You tell yourself you’re fine, but underneath, you’re bracing for rejection.

That’s how emotional distance becomes contagious: one person’s fear of being consumed triggers another person’s fear of being too much.

How Avoidance Becomes Armor

Let’s be honest—many of us have learned avoidance not as dysfunction but as defense. When you’ve been made to feel “less chosen,” self-protection becomes a love language.

Avoidance can look like:

• Keeping dating casual so no one can hurt you.

• Talking yourself out of liking someone before they can disappoint you.

• Saying, “I’m focusing on myself right now,” when what you really mean is, “I don’t trust that anyone will choose me fully.”
  

For Black and Brown women, that’s not pathology—it’s adaptation. You’ve watched the world rank desirability and you’ve built resilience around it. But over time, that resilience can harden into isolation. You stop expecting to be met emotionally, so you stop trying to connect at all.

And that’s why this season of Love Is Blind caught my attention. It wasn’t just the emotional avoidance itself—it was who was avoiding and why.

What Love Is Blind Accidentally Revealed

Season 9 unintentionally exposed what happens when attachment meets bias. Avoidance isn’t just about childhood wounds—it’s also about the social hierarchies that tell us who’s safe to love.

In this case, the discomfort didn’t come from being rejected by the system, but from holding power within it. Kacie, a white woman, and Anna, an Asian woman, sit at the top of the dating hierarchy where attraction and social approval tend to affirm their worth. Patrick, an Asian man, does not.

So when he entered the picture as an equal emotional match—but one who didn’t fit the unspoken “most desired” mold—it created tension neither woman could name. Rather than confront that discomfort, they detached. And that’s what makes this love triangle so interesting: it’s not just about who gets chosen, but who feels entitled to choose.

Their avoidance wasn’t born from fear of rejection, but from proximity to privilege. It’s a quieter form of bias that dresses itself up as self-awareness:

“It’s not that I’m uncomfortable; it’s that this connection isn’t right for me.”

That’s how systemic bias operates—it doesn’t always show up as open discrimination. Sometimes, it sounds like discernment.

And that’s the part that stings when you’re watching as a woman of color—you recognize that kind of avoidance because you’ve been on the receiving end of it. The story shifts, the logic sounds polished, but the message underneath is the same: you’re lovable, just not by me.

That’s why these conversations matter. They remind us that emotional safety and social comfort often overlap—and until we start naming how bias influences attraction, we’ll keep mistaking avoidance for clarity.

What We Can Learn From It

If you’ve ever been both Anna and Patrick—someone who withdraws and someone who’s been withdrawn from—you’re not alone. Avoidant attachment thrives in silence and shame. The healing starts when you can name it without judgment.

Try asking yourself:

• When do I start finding flaws in people who actually like me?

• What stories do I tell myself to make emotional distance feel safer?

• What do I believe about my own desirability—and who taught me that?
  

You don’t need to chase people who can’t meet you. But you can practice staying present long enough to see what’s real, instead of what your fear predicts.
If this conversation hit a nerve, you’re exactly who I created The Village for.

It’s a private community inside Her Soul Supply where single women of color unpack the patterns we’ve inherited—about love, desirability, and belonging—and replace them with ones that honor our wholeness.

It’s not a dating group. It’s a space for growth, sisterhood, and truth.

Because you don’t need another app to feel seen—you need a community that reminds you you’re not the problem.

You can learn more at www.hersoulsupply.com/village