Reality TV
‘The Bachelor’ vs. ‘Love Is Blind’ By the Numbers: Which Show Is More Successful?
Grant Ellis‘ journey has come to a close, adding another happy couple to the list of successful relationships that have come out of the long-standing Bachelor franchise… at least for now.
While we are cautiously optimistic that Grant and his fiancée, Juliana Pasquarosa, were made to last, Bachelor fans know all too well that an engagement does not always end in a wedding, just as a final rose doesn’t always come with a ring.
The Bachelor, which features one single man looking to find love within a pool of around 25 women, has been a staple of network reality TV since it premiered in 2002. While the program delivers on an entertainment level, The Bachelor‘s ultimate promise of the lead finding his soulmate, or at least a long-term partner, is met far less often. In fact, after 29 seasons of the original show, only six couples are still together (including Grant and Juliana), and just three are married. Doesn’t that seem kind of low?
Disney / Anne Marie Fox
While The Bachelor was not the first of its kind, it has become synonymous with the genre of romance-centric reality TV, creating impossibly large shoes to fill for any other TV show attempting to forge real-life romance. That is, until Netflix put its hat in the ring—or should we say pod.
Love Is Blind, which debuted on the streamer in 2020, is almost the exact opposite of The Bachelor while still having the same end goal. Instead of one lead with many suitors, there is an evenly matched number of people looking for love. However, unlike a Love Island or even Bachelor in Paradise, the couples that forge connections cannot see each other until they’re engaged, leaving more couples per season and more room for post-proposal surprises.
After five years, Love Is Blind has definitely cemented Netflix’s reality TV legacy, delivering plenty of juicy drama and swoonworthy moments. While Love Is Blind contestants take a very different route towards finding long-lasting love than contestants on The Bachelor, if you’ve ever questioned which show has created more successful relationships, you’re not alone. We’ve not only pondered this question but done actual math to solve it.
Without further ado, we’re breaking down all of The Bachelor versus Love Is Blind data to definitively solve reality TV’s most romantic equation: Which dating format is more successful at creating lasting love? Reality TV fans, buckle in, we are about to make like Timothée Chalamet and hit you with some “statistics.”
The setup
We know what you’re thinking, The Bachelor has so many seasons and spinoffs, how is this even a fair match-up? Trust us, we had that question, too.
To even the playing field, we’re only including the original Bachelor format, i.e. just The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. That comes down to an astonishing 50 seasons of regular Bachelor/Bachelorette to Love Is Blind‘s eight. While this still seems like a massive disparity, we found that due to the nature of each show’s format, they’re actually quite evenly matched.
On either show, there are many contestants who don’t find love. Whether that’s The Bachelor contestants who get sent home on premiere night or the Pod Squad members who don’t find a connection with anyone on the other side of the wall, the chance that your person is on a reality TV show is quite low, and that’s okay.
There are also couples who do leave their show together but don’t get engaged, this includes couples like Bachelor Matt James and Rachael Kirkconnell or the Pod Squad’s Meg Fink and Mason Horacek. For the purposes of this data, we had to draw the line somewhere. For us, that means that these statistics only include couples who got engaged on their respective show.
It’s also important to note that many long-lasting couples have been formed within Bachelor Nation, whether it be on Bachelor in Paradise or out in the real world, including couples like Grocery Store Joe Amabile and Serena Pitt, as well as Jared Haibon and Ashley Iaconetti. However, these couples are not included in this data, as they got engaged outside of the regular format of the show. The same can be said for Love Is Blind contestants like A.D. Smith and Ollie Sutherland, who met within the Netflix universe on Perfect Match.
TL;DR, the list of couples could have gone on all day. We’re only counting couples who got engaged on The Bachelor/The Bachelorette and Love Is Blind (US) as “successful” couples.
How many proposals have there been on each show?
Including Bachelor Nation’s newest couple, there have been a total of 42 proposals on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. Out of 50 seasons, that means that 12 did not end in a proposal. You might also remember that two seasons of The Bachelorette had two leads and two proposals: Tayshia Adams replaced Clare Crawley halfway through Season 16, and Rachel Recchia and Gabby Windey were co-Bachelorettes during Season 19 following a particularly horrible double breakup with Clayton Echard.
We also have two seasons of The Bachelor that sported two engagements, but not for the same reason. Both Jason Mesnick (Season 13) and Arie Luyendyk Jr. (Season 22) got engaged to one contestant at their final rose ceremony, broke things off with that contestant, and then married their runner-up. While only Luyendyk actually proposed on camera, these couples are still considered successful by Bachelor Nation standards.
As for Love Is Blind, the season average is 5.37 proposals, with Season 7 having the most proposals at seven, and Season 5 having the least with only three. Unlike The Bachelor, there is only one person who was involved in two Love Is Blind proposals: Zack Goytowski. Goytowski originally proposed to Irina Solomonova, but much like Mesnick and Luyendyk, he ultimately married the woman he originally thought he had the second-best connection with, Bliss Poureetezadi.
That makes 43 proposals on Love Is Blind to The Bachelor and The Bachelorette’s 42. See what we mean about a fair match-up?
How many couples are still together?
Clifton Prescod / Netflix
There are 10 couples still together from Bachelor Nation: six from The Bachelor and four from The Bachelorette.
In chronological order, this includes: Trista Rehn and Ryan Sutter (The Bachelorette Season 1), Jason Mesnick and Molly Malaney (The Bachelor Season 13), Sean Lowe and Catherine Giudici (The Bachelor Season 17), Desiree Hartsock and Chris Siegfried (The Bachelorette Season 9), JoJo Fletcher and Jordan Rodgers (The Bachelorette Season 12), Arie Luyendyk Jr. and Lauren Burnham (The Bachelor Season 22), Zach Shallcross and Kaity Biggar (The Bachelor Season 27), Charity Lawson and Dotun Olubeko (The Bachelorette Season 20), Joey Graziadei and Kelsey Anderson (The Bachelor Season 28), and finally, Grant Ellis and Juliana Pasquarosa (The Bachelorette Season 28).
As for Love Is Blind, there are 11 couples still together.
In chronological order, this includes: Lauren Speed and Cameron Hamilton (Season 1), Amber Pike and Matthew Barnett (Season 1), Alexa Alfia and Brennon Lemieux (Season 3), Colleen Reed and Matt Bolton (Season 3), Kwame Appiah and Chelsea Griffin (Season 4), Brett Brown and Tiffany Pennywell (Season 4), Zack Goytowski and Bliss Poureetezadi (Season 4), Lydia Gonzalez and Milton Johnson (Season 5), Johnny McIntyre and Amy Cortés (Season 6), Taylor Krause and Garrett Josemans (Season 7), and finally, Daniel Hastings and Taylor Haag (Season 8).
Which dating show has produced more successful couples?
Finally, we have everything we need to definitively answer our original question. On the surface, Love Is Blind has created the most successful couples, beating The Bachelor by one, with 11 Love Is Blind couples still together to The Bachelor‘s 10.
Factoring in the number of proposals each show has seen, we can find the success rate for these couples. Out of all 50 seasons of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, only 38 ended in proposals, including the four seasons that ended with two proposals. This comes to a total of 42. With a ratio of 42 proposals to 10 successful couples, the regular format of The Bachelor currently has a success rate of 23.80.
Out of eight seasons of Love Is Blind, there have been about five proposals per season, totaling 43 proposals. While the numbers are incredibly close, Love Is Blind has seen 43 proposals and 11 successful couples, making their success rate 25.58. This means that the couples we see get engaged on Love Is Blind are 1.78% more likely to stay together than couples we see get engaged on The Bachelor. And, yes, that also means that we sat down to do all that math to find that there is only a very small difference in the number of successful couples.
Swooon; ABC; Netflix; Getty Images
What does this mean?
When it comes to which of these romance-centric reality TV shows has produced the most successful couples, Love Is Blind takes the cake… by one.
Ultimately, the difference between successful couples produced by The Bachelor and Love Is Blind, at this moment in time, is nothing monumental. However, if crunching these numbers has taught us anything, it’s this: The format of Love Is Blind strives to produce more than one couple per season, and The Bachelor/The Bachelorette only produce one. From the moment Love Is Blind surpassed the number of successful couples from The Bachelor, The Bachelor didn’t stand a chance.
However, just for kicks, there is another way you could look at it.
Given 50 seasons with the potential for one engagement, 10 successful couples from The Bachelor mean there is a 20% chance of a successful couple per season. At the same time, there are thirty contestants on Love Is Blind with the potential for 15 engagements… Do you catch our drift?
If The Bachelor aims to create one couple per season and is successful 20% of the time, it could be said that Love Is Blind aims to create 15 per season and is only successful 9.16% of the time.
Yes, Love Is Blind has created more successful couples than The Bachelor. But at the same time, in every season of The Bachelor, the potential couple is over 10% more likely to stay together than every potential Love Is Blind couple.
Did you expect to see these results? Comment below with which reality TV show you would go on to find long-lasting love.
