SPOILER: This column contains potential spoilers for “Age of Attraction.”
What happens when you ask a group of strangers to date without knowing each other’s ages? According to Netflix, the answer is true love. But in reality, it’s roughly eight hours of complete chaos and nearly unwatchable content that doesn’t just beg the question of whether Netflix should have been filming these moments, but if they should have even made the show at all.
Netflix’s latest reality dating show, “Age of Attraction,” follows 40 single men and women, ages 22 to 60, as they try dating without knowing how old their partner is. After a short period of time mingling at a resort in Whistler, British Columbia, the couples gradually reveal their ages and the rest of the series focuses on the six pairs with the largest age gaps, the largest being a 33 year difference.
In typical Netflix reality dating show fashion, “Age of Attraction” takes itself far too seriously for what it really is and in doing so creates a space where toxic behavior can be mistaken for a normal relationship.
The show is hosted by Nick Viall, former star of “The Bachelor” and host of “The Viall Files” podcast, and his wife, social media influencer Natalie Joy. The pair constantly refers to the show as an “experiment” instead of what it actually is: an overly dramatic cash grab for Netflix.
This isn’t the first time Netflix has painted one of their dating shows in such a light. Nick and Vanessa Lachey, hosts of “Love is Blind” and “The Ultimatum: Marry or Move,” have often treated their own shows as more of a scientific social experiment than a reality series. It’s a shallow attempt at making their shows seem more important but really only succeeds at making them all that much more ridiculous.
Most of the viewers watching understand the show has almost no genuine intention of helping people find true love and instead was really only made to farm at least eight episodes of potentially viral content.
And it’s hard to blame Netflix when time and time again the viewership numbers prove that these shows appeal to audiences in a big way.
In March 2025, “Love is Blind” raked in 1.2 billion minutes viewed from Feb. 24 to March 2 that year and came in at number three on streaming charts. It set a Nielsen streaming record, which measures viewership milestones on streaming platforms, for an unscripted series.
“Age of Attraction” seems to be going down the same path. The show reached 3.8 million views in its first five days after releasing March 11, and Netflix renewed the show for a second season shortly after the finale aired. The reunion episode, which aired on “The Viall Files” podcast April 1, also garnered popularity, reaching 1.9 million views in just one week.
Unfortunately, the drama that makes shows like “Age of Attraction” so successful is often entirely engineered and incredibly problematic.
Despite being introduced to many characters in the first few episodes of the show, “Age of Attraction” spends a majority of the series specifically focusing on the couples with the biggest age gaps. After revealing their ages in the “promise room” – a ridiculously low stakes space compared to other shows where the couples don’t get engaged or even define the relationship, but simply promise to spend the rest of their time on the show together – they move to Miami to figure out if their relationship can really withstand being from entirely different generations.
But with some of these couples, it quickly becomes clear that age is the least of their problems.
The most apparent example of this is Jorge Sanchez and Vanelle Femnou, a couple with a 33 year age gap who becomes so toxic that the two break up halfway into the show. While the age difference is the largest gap on the show, their drama extends far past how old they are. Instead, what causes most of their issues is Sanchez’s continuous habit of lying to Femnou and invalidating her feelings every time she brings up an issue she is having.
Not only does Sanchez lie and tell her he does not have children when he actually has two, but despite initially saying he respects her choosing not to have sex until marriage, he immediately turns around and criticizes her for this choice. They discuss these problems later on in the reunion, where the two reveal that they are now good friends, but it still felt like they were talking around the subject to make Sanchez’s actions appear justified.
It moved past the point of drama for the sake of interesting television and into a whole separate, but unfortunately not surprising, territory of Netflix normalizing manipulation and toxic relationship dynamics. Reality television typically comes with the understanding that what you are watching isn’t actually reality, but when Netflix continuously puts these unhealthy narratives out into the world it risks reinforcing harmful behavior as normal.
Unfortunately, while “Age of Attraction” is one of the most recent examples, it isn’t the only show where this is a problem. Studies have shown that reality television, dating shows in particular, can influence people’s perceptions of love and perpetuate sexist attitudes toward women. It’s a dissapointing reality that, with the popularity of reality dating shows, probably won’t end anytime soon, but it’s important that fans are aware of it.
While telling someone to not watch “Age of Attraction” would be entirely hypocritical of me, I can reassure you that even with my very low standards of what makes a Netflix reality show watchable, this show still takes the cake as the biggest waste of my time.
