Not Kourtney
Kim & Tom, Clinton & Stacy, and The Petty Men of 'Love Is Blind'
The Low-Brow Lowdown
Kim K gets in a bidding war with Tom Brady. Okay, flirty!! The “just friends” friends both attended a charity gala in Atlantic city, and engaged in a “cheeky” back-and-forth over a bodacious piece from artist George Condo (who notably painted the cover for Kanye’s My Dark Twisted Fantasy). Such a rom-com (for rich people) moment!
Brady ultimately won, but the artist agreed to make Kim an identical piece for a matching $2M donation. Another thing that these two hot singles can have in common!
Colton Underwood launches his own production company. White men, if you ever get soft cancelled, just get gay married and everyone will let it slide. He and his husb have just launched As Best Friends Productions (awful name), with the goal of creating LGBTQ-focused media that will resonate with conservatives and middle America, due to Colton’s own conservative upbringing.
Bed bugs have taken over Paris Fashion Week. They’re all over trains, movie theaters, and hotel rooms, which means all our cool kid fashion New Yorkers are going to trek them back here upon returning from their adventures. I’m never leaving my apartment again. Or going to Paris, not that that was an option, but now I can pretend it’s my choice.
Queen’s Gambit star Anya Taylor-Joy gets married. She tied the knot with musician Malcom McRae in Venice, Italy (don’t tell Kim & Kourtney). She wore a custom Dior gown in beige, and famous guests included Cara Delevingne, her The Menu co-star Nicholas Hoult, and character queen Julia Garner.
Joe Biden’s dog has been removed from the White House. After a staggering eleven biting incidents, 2-year-old German Shepherd Commander has been removed from the premises, as “next steps are evaluated.” I’m sure Cesar Milan would be more than happy to stop by!
Stacy London and Clinton Kelly are back together. This literally happened like two seconds after I sent out last week’s email, so apologies for the delayed response.
The former What Not To Wear co-stars famously had a messy falling out after the show, when Clinton wrote in his memoir that he and Stacy had an intense love-hate relationship while filming, prompting Stacy to block him on Twitter.
Apparently over the pandemic, they reconnected and hashed everything out, and now they’re going on a bizarre live tour where they’re going to talk about the importance of forgiveness (?). Please check out the tour website, it seriously looks like they designed it themselves.
The Men of Love Is Blind Season 5 Are Petty Little Bitches
“Years 1-2 and years 5-8 are when couples are most likely to get divorced.” These are among the first words we hear from Uche, a 34-year-old lawyer who is already lecturing some poor woman on the other side of the wall about the realities of marriage (he’s never been married himself, but he read an article in The Atlantic, so he’s an expert, of course).
Uche only seems to have one mode of communication: a measured yet commanding monotone, always accompanied by an air of superiority and condescension. He’s good looking and owns a Tesla, but is entirely humorless, and if I tried to conjure an image of him on a date night, all I can picture is him sitting stone-faced at the Comedy Cellar or arguing with the instructor about the most authentic Italian pasta-making technique at a couples cooking class.
Even though he has less personality than C3P0 on 5mg of klonopin, Uche still manages to forge a connection with Aaliyah, a 29-year-old ICU nurse. They bond over surface level topics, like their shared love of poetry, but things quickly fall off the rails when Aaliyah reveals she cheated on a past boyfriend who wasn’t fulfilling her sexually.
Uche seizes this opportunity to launch his audition tape for World’s Douchiest Man, and berates Aaliyah for being a “recent cheater,” throwing into question their entire connection, despite the fact that A.) it’s not like she cheated on him and B.) she had no obligation to share this intimate detail with him, let alone the millions of viewers that will become privy to an unflattering secret once the show airs.
It’s an uncomfortable watch, and if he’s that quick to treat someone who is essentially a stranger so callously, one can only imagine how he would treat a girlfriend or a wife if and when he felt betrayed.
When Aailyah learns that she isn’t the only one harboring a secret — Uche and her Pod Squad bestie Lydia had dated on and off before the show and kept it from her — she eventually chooses to leave the set without saying goodbye, following a blowout with Lydia off-camera.
Once again, rather than attempt to understand how his own behaviors contributed to Aaliyah’s mental state and departure, he condescends to her during a producer-sanctioned phone call: “We talked about this, Aaliyah,” he sighs, like a no nonsense history teacher who already told you there would be no extensions granted for your Industrial Revolution essays.
The pair ultimately calls it quits at a foodless lunch post-pods.
One would think that our walking Devil’s Advocate’s reign of terror would end here, but alas! He shows up to the Pod Squad happy hour to confront Lydia, his Real World ex who he’s accused of stalking him.
Uche enters the conversation intent on humiliating Lydia, showing her screenshots of text messages from friends of his who noticed she was not-so-stealthily watching their Instagram stories during their situationship (always use a burner, people!).
It’s unclear why he’s motivated to instigate this take down regarding events that happened months before the show, especially given that he’s no longer entangled with Aaliyah. If he was truly so concerned, why didn’t he bring these issues to light with Lydia before filming, or privately after?
You can of course make the argument that production pushed him towards an on-camera confrontation, and I’m sure they did, but Uche has appeared incredibly strong-willed with an immovable “moral compass,” so I can’t imagine he would have an issue saying no to a producer he disagreed with if their suggestion went against his principles.
That same evening Izzy, the playboy of the pods, pulls Johnie for a chat, the woman he almost chose over his now fiancé Stacy, but backed away from as soon as he learned that she had dealt with trauma in past relationships (ew!).
Johnie, for her part, was one of the pods’ biggest chaos agents. She dumped prototypical Nice Guy™ Chris in pursuit of Izzy, and when Izzy pulled the plug, she crawled back to Chris in a high-key desperate move. She spins him a tale about how she realized her relationship with Izzy was consistent with her usual toxic pattern of dating emotionally unavailable men — the exact opposite of why she told Izzy she wanted to be with him instead of safe, boring Chris.
When Johnie and Chris meet at the airport on the way home from the pods, they decide to take a run at dating, despite Chris’s initial hesitations about her character when he learns of her bamboozley tricks from comparing notes with Izzy. At the Pod Squad happy hour, though, it’s clear that Chris has moved past this maneuver.
You know who hasn’t moved on, despite being engaged to someone else? Izzy. He’s adamant that he needs to tell Johnie that he and everyone else believes her to be “sketchy as fuck,” through the lens of “advice.” Who wants advice from a guy who barely has a job and doesn’t own cutlery?
Much like Uche, his motivation is murky. What benefit does he receive from making a woman cry at a party? If he’s truly happy with Cool Girl Stacy, shouldn’t that be enough to satisfy his clearly fragile ego?
What’s almost worse than the confrontation itself is the aftermath, when Izzy finds Stacy and brags to her about his performance, like a 5th grader telling his mom about a goal he scored in gym class: “I called her out on her shit. I was fucking railing her,” he boasts, vibrating with energy.
“You look like, shaken up,” an unimpressed Stacy notes, confused as to why he’s belaboring an essentially nothing conversation with his ex.
But we can’t talk about irrational men without discussing JP, the stoic, American Flag-swaddled firefighter who can’t break the ice with his bubbly fiance Taylor. After connecting in the pods, JP shuts down in person, and after days of awkwardness during the Mexico couple’s retreat, an exhausted Taylor finally decides to call their sad excuse for an engagement like she sees it.
When pressed on how their communication could have possibly gotten worse once a wall was removed from between them, JP confesses that he was turned off during the couple’s engagement reveal due to how much makeup Taylor was wearing. To him, it made him feel like he was engaged to someone “fake.”
While a certain class of man will often reference makeup as “false advertising” while claiming to prefer a natural face (generally this preference still includes makeup, they’ve just never heard of Glossier), using said preference as an entire basis for why you’re unable to communicate effectively with your “fiancé” is a stretch. I like a guy with a beard — does that mean a clean-shaven man is hiding his true self from me, and therefore I’m well within my right to stop speaking to him?
What’s more likely, is that JP felt insecure about his own appearance in comparison to Taylor, a more conventionally attractive person, and used these comments about her “caked up face” and the makeup “all over [his] jacket” to embarrass her in an attempt to level the playing field, especially once he knew the engagement was headed towards the can.
With only two engagements on the board heading into wedding week, could this be the first strike out in the show’s history? Has the production team lost its initial passion for proving the experiment’s value (ala The Bachelor touting JoJo and Jordan screaming “this journey wooorkkkss!) by deliberately creating a cast of all losers?
With the reunion on the horizon, I need assurances from Netflix that the Lacheys were given some private coaching sessions with Andy Cohen after last season’s embarrassment to the form. The stakes are too high this time around, and if they think they can distract us from the issues at hand with a shoddy selfie video of baby daddy Bartise, they are unfortunately mistaken.
Prekend Wrapped
Watching: The Ringleader: The Case of The Bling Ring (HBO)
Eating: I learned about this low-cal chocolate on Shark Tank last night — from the makers of Halo Top. If I can locate some I will do a review!!!
Reading: “Did Taylor Swift Attend a New York Jets Game to Detract From Her Private Jets?” (Vulture)
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