The Girls on ‘Love Is Blind’ Are Getting the Ick

It was a moment that was so deliciously cringe, it should live forever in Love Is Blind history. After a tumultuous courtship and a slightly unhinged engagement, Brittany Wisniewski was standing behind a wall, waiting to see her new fiancé, Leo Braudy.

As the doors parted and Brittany laid eyes on her man for the first time, an almost imperceptible shadow passed over her face. Her eyes widened, just slightly, in an expression that read: “Oh.” As they embraced and Leo greedily took her in with his eyes, Brittany did nothing. She looked like a deer in the headlights. She looked a tad grossed out.

Yep, it seems Brittany got the ick. Though it was obvious from the second she saw him, she confirmed it with her immediate reaction to the cameras after they parted ways. “Oh God, what have I done?” she exclaimed. (For his part, Leo’s reaction was, “Holy fuck, she’s hot.”)

Unsurprisingly, the couple wasn’t chosen to continue their “experiment/journey” on a trip to Mexico and broke up shortly after.

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She’s not the only one from season seven of Love Is Blind to get the ick. Leo’s other love interest, Hannah Jiles, also seemed to have regrets after meeting her new fiancé, Nick Dorka, and laying eyes on him for the first time.

Hannah, we learn, had expected him to look…different. In the pods, Nick described himself as an athletic former college football player, which he was. It’s just that he was a kicker, and thus has a body type that’s more Matty Healy than, say, Travis Kelce.

“What he said [about his looks], I don’t think was really truthful,” she told the cameras. “It is making me feel a little insecure because I feel like I’m bigger than him.”

Hannah, unlike Brittany, persevered despite her misgivings. But once the couple got to Mexico, Nick’s goofy behavior started to rankle her. It came to a head when he wanted to play on a ride-along duck statue next to the resort pool, a seemingly harmless action that she vehemently told him not to do.

“It’s gonna give me the ick,” she said, deadpan. He went anyway. And sure enough, she got the ick. When Nick returned from frolicking on the ducks with a random woman—who called Hannah “jealous”—his fiancé looked positively disgusted.

“I’m literally trying to keep the passion alive, Nick,” she told him. “You riding a duck is hard for me.”

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“Getting the ick” is one of those things that has been around for centuries, maybe even millenia, but now has been given an official name thanks to TikTok (see: girl dinner). KnowYourMeme describes it as “that one innocuous thing an otherwise mundane date does that immediately turns us off.”

The term really took off on TikTok and other social media platforms about a year or so ago. But, again, it’s nothing new. Just look at old episodes of Seinfeld, where a common trope on the show was all the random and illogical reasons why Jerry would break up with women he was dating (for example, that her hands were too big).

On TikTok, women describe getting the ick from things as mundane as finding out a man is a few months older than them, seeing them push a shopping cart, or, simply, liking them. Many also discuss perhaps some deeper-rooted causes for the ick, like the fact that they tend to get it while on dates more often with men who are nice and respectful rather than “fuckboys.”

That’s actually a plotline in the new Netflix series Nobody Wants This, in an episode appropriately titled “The Ick.” In it, Kristen Bell’s character Joanne is turned off after her new boyfriend, Noah (Adam Brody), seems a little too into meeting her parents. He brings them a comically huge bouquet of sunflowers and is visibly nervous, awkwardly saying things like “prego” in a faux-Italian accent. When Joanne laments to her sister, Morgan (Justine Lupe), that she got the ick, Morgan tells her that the relationship is doomed because you can’t come back from that.

The insistence that you “can’t come back from the ick” is a widespread belief. Another season-seven podster, Monica Davis, said this very thing to her new fiancé, Stephen Richardson, during a conversation in Mexico. She told him that she’d been so relieved to not get the ick after meeting him in real life because “as a female, there’s no turning back” from it. (Stephen, for what it’s worth, replied that he’s “never known” a man to get the ick.)

“Once you get it, it’s just like, something you can’t shake,” Monica continued. “And it can happen so innocently.”

But is that really the case? In an interview with New York Magazine, the show’s creator Erin Foster said that the flowers in particular were a detail that really happened in her courtship with her now husband, and that she realized her revulsion over the gesture may have been masking something deeper in her psyche.

“The flowers were so long, and they kept falling over,” Foster said. “Sitting there, I was like, Well, if someone cares this much, then that feels like a weakness.”

Spoiler alert, Foster moved on from her ick, and so does Joanne. Noah rightly calls it out as a form of self-sabotaging the relationship and essentially urges her to fight it. “I’m on your side. I can handle you,” he tells her.

It’s a mature response from a fictional couple in their 30s who have lived enough life to know that one small “ick” shouldn’t necessarily derail a possible future together. When I did an extremely informal poll of my Glamour colleagues in long-term relationships, every single one of them said they had gotten the ick from their partner in the early stages of their courtship. The ick, it seems, may just be part of life.

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I’m not so sure Hannah, who is 26, will be able to move past it. In episode six, the last one before the next batch of Love Is Blind becomes available next week, her annoyance and, frankly, revulsion, with her new fiancé becomes more and more palpable. It culminates in her writing an actual list about the things that annoy her about him. An ick list, if you will.

It’s an interesting shift for the reality dating show, which has, with its success rate, pretty much proven that love is in fact not actually blind and physical attraction does matter. Perhaps the most well-known example of looks getting in the way of the “experiment” was in season six, when podster Jimmy Pressnell looked visibly disappointed upon meeting fiancée Chelsea Blackwell. This was because in the pods, Chelsea memorably told him that she looked like Megan Fox.

This season, however, it’s the women that are being turned off by their love interests upon meeting IRL. Unlike Pressnell and other previous instances where the men weren’t attracted to their partners, the women of season seven aren’t immediately disappointed by the dude’s faces or bodies. It seemed to be something more—their mannerisms, their persona, or just their general vibe. When men on the show seem to get their version of the ick, it seems to be from pure physical appearance alone. For women, it’s a little more nuanced. That tracks with the overall ick trend online, which is discussed overwhelmingly more by straight women than straight men.

It remains to be seen if Hannah and Nick can salvage their relationship and make it to the altar, though I’m not optimistic. But it does seem clear that while love may be blind, it definitely is not blind to the ick.