Spoilers for Love Is Blind season four below.
Dating can be a real snooze. On the fourth season of Love Is Blind, the reality-television dating experiment series which returned to Netflix on Friday, one potential Couple learned that the hard way. Contestants Tiffany and Brett are on a Date something unbelievable happens: Tiffany straight up falls asleep. She passes out. She goes night night.
And everything had been going so well for the would-be Lovers! On their first pod date, Tiffany and Brett learned each of their longest Relationships had lasted for just two years—what a coincidence! On their second, they discovered that they were both wearing teal outfits—now things are getting uncanny! Nothing, it seemed, could stop their connection from reaching its full fruition. Nothing, that is, except Tiffany’s REM cycle.
As a conked-out Tiffany dreams of being let out of this Stanford prison experiment of a reality show, Brett’s anxiety rises, until he leaves the pod in disbelief. A dejected Brett returns to the villa—excuse me, the “men’s lounge”—and shares his disappointment with his fellow bros: “Our conversation was, ‘I think I’m falling in love with you.’ And then I’m telling her how I feel and then it’s quiet and then, ‘Hello?’”
Here’s the thing, though: I think Tiffany deserves some credit. Love Is Blind shuttles its contestants like cattle from one cage to another all day, asking them to bear their souls to a relative stranger that they cannot see. I am emotionally spent after simply watching an episode of Love Is Blind, and often need to take a nap to process what I’ve seen. Now think about what it must be like living that. It’s enough to knock you out for a full month.
And how much they drink can’t be helping. The classic Love Is Blind wine goblets—matte gold apparently so that we cannot see how full they are—made their first appearance on Tiffany and Brett’s second date, an omen of things to come. When she falls asleep, a huge bottle of Casamigos gold—thank you, George Clooney—is on the table before her. When contestants Chelsea and April arrive to awaken Tiffany with a rousing rendition of Usher’s “Hey Daddy” (an incredible deep cut), she’s got no idea that Brett is gone.
Now, Tiffany did make some unforced errors. Her first mistake was taking off her shoes and getting comfy on the couch. Her second? Fully lying down swaddled in a blanket. As an accidental napper myself, I knew that was a recipe for disaster. (I’m sure the second half of The Banshees of Inisherin was great, but I’ll never know for sure.)
“I want to be my most authentic self around someone and they not judge me, or me feeling like I have to change,” says Tiffany during one of her confessionals. And you know what? She did just that on Love Is Blind. Sometimes, your most authentic self is really, unbelievably sleepy.
Ultimately, Tiffany manages to spin the situation into a positive. “I passed out because I was listening to your voice and it was so soothing,” she tells Brett on their next date. “Did I just mess everything up?” Fortunately, she did not; Brett gets down on one knee and proposes to the wall in front of him Tiffany anyway. (Yes, that’s what happens on this insane show.) Blind though it may be, love apparently sometimes needs to rest its eyes for a spell. And that’s okay. Falling asleep on a date, I can understand. Proposing to someone one date after they fall asleep on you…that’s where we might have to draw the line.