The Formula Is the Point
YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM REMEMBERS THE STORY — 2 OF 5
Every season of Love Is Blind follows the same structure. The pods. The proposals. The honeymoon phase. The apartment. The families. The wedding day. Some say yes. Some don’t. The credits roll.
You knew this before you pressed play. You know it now. And you will watch it anyway — possibly more than once, possibly across multiple countries’ versions, possibly with opinions about which cast is the most unhinged that you are prepared to defend.
I want to suggest that this is not in spite of the formula. It is because of it.
Dopamine With a Safety Net
Formulaic television — reality dating shows, procedural dramas, romance novels, serialized comfort reads — is often treated as the low end of the cultural spectrum. Guilty pleasures. Things you watch or read but don’t talk about at dinner parties.
The neuroscience tells a different story.
What the formula provides is a very specific neurological experience: dopamine with a regulated container. The tension of “will they connect” or “will he confess” or “will she survive the interrogation” produces genuine anticipation — the brain releases dopamine in the lead-up to an uncertain outcome. But the formula ensures that the uncertainty operates within a known structure. Some couples connect. You don’t know which ones. But you know the arc. You know the show will deliver resolution. Your nervous system holds both of those things at once: the pleasure of not knowing, inside the safety of knowing the shape.
This is not a small thing. It is, in fact, precisely the experience that most of our actual lives do not offer.
Real uncertainty — the kind we are all swimming in right now, personally and collectively — does not come with a guaranteed arc. The nervous system cannot predict how it resolves. That state of open-ended uncertainty is genuinely costly to maintain. It requires resources. It creates the low-grade activation that we experience as anxiety, vigilance, exhaustion.
The formula gives your system a place to put that energy without the cost.
The M/M Romance Connection
I wrote earlier this year about M/M romance fiction — specifically about what happens to a reader’s nervous system when they encounter a story in which men are allowed to be emotionally complex, vulnerable, and tender with each other.
The mechanism I described there is the same one at work in every formulaic genre: the story is doing a kind of recoding. Not just entertainment. Not just escape. The repeated exposure to a particular narrative shape — in which connection is possible, in which emotional honesty is rewarded, in which the ending is earned and satisfying — is a form of nervous system input.
Your system learns from story. It always has. Before we had books, before we had screens, before we had any of the things we now call media, we sat around fires and told each other stories about how the world works. What is safe. What is dangerous. How things tend to go.
I’ve noticed since doing this work, watching old movies I used to think were ‘romantic’ growing up like Cocktail that those stories were encoding unhealthy norms - like conquering/duping women was funny + cool.
Formula is the structure through which that transmission happens most efficiently.
Why Procedural Dramas Work Despite the Murder
This is a question I genuinely enjoy: why is it that procedural crime dramas — shows in which someone dies in the first four minutes, every episode, for fifteen seasons — are among the most comforting things people reach for when they are stressed?
The content is objectively dark. The formula overrides it.
There is a body. There is a detective. There is a team. There are dead ends. There is a breakthrough. It gets solved. The formula is so reliable that your nervous system can predict the emotional arc of the episode before anything has happened. The initial shock of the crime registers, then passes, because your system already knows where this is going.
What looks like morbid comfort is actually structural comfort. The genre guarantees resolution. Someone will find out what happened. The mystery will close. In a world in which many of the most important things do not close — in which we are frequently asked to sit with unresolved outcomes and uncertain futures — the procedural offers something almost radical: the promise that this one, at least, will make sense by the end.
Reframing What You Watch
I am not arguing that you should watch Love Is Blind instead of doing the work of processing your life. I am arguing that watching Love Is Blind might be part of how your nervous system recovers enough to do that work.
There is a difference between avoidance and recovery. One keeps you stuck. The other builds the capacity to move.
The formula shows are recovery. Your system knows the shape. It can relax inside it. And a regulated nervous system — one that has had the chance to return to baseline — is a far more capable nervous system than one running indefinitely on stress.
So the next time someone asks you what you’ve been watching, say it plainly: something formulaic, on purpose. It’s infrastructure.
This essay is part of the series Your Nervous System Remembers the Story — a deep dive into why humans are wired for narrative, why formula is a feature not a flaw, and what your comfort reads and comfort watches are actually doing for your nervous system.
Next: Essay 3, July 16 — Beach Reads Aren’t Trashy. They’re Therapeutic: on summer reading, the happily-ever-after, and why your beach bag is a nervous system toolkit.