“Take a breath and go ahead,” Robert Galinsky says, eyeing his student from across a Zoom screen. Dylan , a 45-year-old from Phoenix, Arizona, dressed in a light blue button-down, exhales and begins to explain for the third time why he wants to search for true love on the Netflix reality-dating series Love Is Blind .

Dylan says he has prioritized his real estate career over romance, and dating apps have failed to produce lasting love. But when he talks about building a connection sight unseen, or “from the inside out,” as he puts it, Galinsky stops him. “That’s killer—we want to save that phrase,” he says, advising Dylan to shave his three-minute explanation down to a sound-bite-worthy chunk. After all, reality TV narratives are built by producers and editors (he cleverly refers to

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