We Best Love No 1 For You Special Episode

[Lupita Calvi]

Thereare only a few truly perfect episodes of television I can think of off the top of my head that are part of my personal canon. None of them are bottle episodes or even really standalones, but they all feel distinct from their seasons and memorable by the way their drama doesn\u2019t unfurl but rather balloon. The Sex and the City episode \u201CEasy Come Easy Go,\u201D is brimming with plot: Carrie starts cheating on Aidan with Big, but Samantha dates the guy with the funkiest tasting spunk, and gives a monologue about oral sex that should be taught in schools. Girls stuffed Marnie singing \u201CStronger\u201D and Adam Driver dancing to Fiona Apple1 and Hannah\u2019s whole Q-Tip thing into a half hour of television. I love Station Eleven\u2019s third episode \u201CHurricane,\u201D and how it paints the desperation of trying to make a relationship work with such texture and moodiness. The adult sleepover episode of Real Housewives of Atlanta has a series of so many disastrous escalations, people are fighting without knowing why. I could go on.

But Love Is Blind season six\u2019s eighth episode has entered my canon. There is no episode of Love Is Blind better than this episode of Love Is Blind. Baby-voiced Jessica or squinting Shaina and the Natalie-Shayne love triangle? They\u2019re not touching this episode. Whatever was going on with Sal and Mallory, whatever went on with Aaliyah and Uche and Lydia and Milton? They cannot compete where they do not compare. This episode of Love Is Blind made me laugh so hard I cried.

\u201CClinging to Love\u201D starts inauspiciously. Chelsea and Jimmy tour each other\u2019s apartments. AD sees Clay\u2019s house, and they compare vision boards. Jeramey gives Laura a tour of the allergy clinic he calls a home \u2014 I would call it immaculate, if it weren\u2019t so bare and clinical.2 Ken and Brittany go through the motions of touring Ken\u2019s apartment too, but he\u2019s on his phone the whole time.

Chelsea\u2019s friends come over to meet Jimmy, who is upstairs working. Chelsea explains what happened in the pods with the Chelsea-Jimmy-Jessica love triangle, and how things ended with her other pod connection, Trevor. It\u2019s the first scene in the episode that has murmurs of greatness: Chelsea, in that conversation, returns to how she\u2019s found Jimmy inattentive \u2026 that one single afternoon. (The way she recounts in detail how she was in two love triangles, but glosses over everything that went down in the Dominican Republic \u2026 but she\u2019s obsessed with only having been kissed once that day \u2026 well it\u2019s certainly something.) Her friends are reassuring, and Jimmy is convincing. He gives a more realistic version of their relationship where they talk through problems (not really) and make decisions together (again, not quite). They seem happy-ish.

\u201CThe most compelling arc in this show's history ever,\u201D a friend texted me after watching \u201Cis the \u2018ppl say I look like Megan Fox\u2019 arc.\u201D Everything about presentation and expectation and the \u201Cblind\u201D part of the Love Is Blind experiment get bundled together in one woman\u2019s anxious self-image. (Chelsea\u2019s friends confirm she has been told she looks like Megan Fox before, but that mostly she gets Carrie Underwood.) Chelsea and Megan Fox look alike in that they have narrow small noses small mouths and are both white women. But it doesn\u2019t matter if Chelsea looks kinda like Megan Fox or that \u201CPeople say I look like Megan Fox\u201D conjures a very specific image of a very specific pinup \u2014 Transformers-Megan Fox, GQ-Megan Fox, aughts male fantasy-Megan Fox \u2014 that even the real Megan Fox does not match. But everyone has opinions about it and can react to it. This is like in Oppenheimer how one reaction sets off a hundred more (can\u2019t stress enough that I don\u2019t know how that science works). The Megan Fox-of-it-all has ramifications that ripple throughout the season.

\u201CClinging to Love\u201D is not done. Back to back, we are given three of the series' best and most puzzling arguments. Johnny and Amy fuss about birth control. Desire I Want To Turn Into You, say Kenneth and Brittany. Chelsea and Jimmy.

Johnny and Amy finally give me a reason to remember their names: Johnny doesn\u2019t want kids yet, and either doesn\u2019t want to wear condoms or doesn\u2019t think condoms are failsafe birth control. Amy doesn\u2019t want to start oral birth control, but has spoken to her gynecologist about it, and says it\u2019d be \u201Cideal.\u201D The couple is at an impasse, unless Johnny, at Amy\u2019s suggestion, gets a vasectomy. \u201CI don\u2019t think we\u2019re going to wait [to have sex] until marriage, but I feel like Johnny\u2019s really scared. I feel like using protection, like, that\u2019s not enough for him.\u201D Principal Kenneth better open those schools: contraception is not usually understood to be limited to either oral birth control or vasectomy.

Instead he\u2019s on that damn phone. Kenneth and Brittany have a late-night conversation about how lunch and a hair appointment made him arrive home at 1:30 in the morning. I\u2019m genuinely at a loss with this conversation and I have watched it no less than six times: it sounds like Brittany is saying that their relationship lacks any palpable desire, that she has listened to \u201CChurch Girl\u201D wants to let go of this body at least a little bit. So why does it seem like Kenneth has already decided their relationship isn\u2019t working, and he\u2019s presenting a deck that ends with him announcing that they\u2019re no longer together?

Brittany is too busy to ever invite intimacy, Ken says, and rejects his affections. (Like at 1:30 in the morning when he wanted to do some kissing, but she wanted to do some snoozing.) \u201CWhen we talk about why are certain things not progressing, we have to be introspective about the parts we are playing too in that role.\u201D But he says that, having already decided on the introspection Brittany isn\u2019t doing. \u201CAnd right now, being transparent, I don\u2019t feel as if you are being introspective about the role that you have played for me, as a man, in regards to that level of intimacy.\u201D It escalate to the greatest breakup in Love Is Blind history, better than even Jackie saying she won\u2019t give Marshall his ring back. Kenneth asks enough leading questions and directs Brittany to conclusions he\u2019s already reached. We are witnessing a breakup via the Socratic method.3

Things are going well when the show cuts back to the Chealsa-Jimmy apartment after the visit from Chelsea\u2019s friends. \u201C[My friends] all told me they really liked you. That makes me happy because today I was worried about you babe,\u201D Chelsea says. \u201CYou had me really worried.\u201D An incomplete list of what worried Chelsea that day: Jimmy did not ask her how her eyebrow appointment went. He spent his workday as a workday, and not hanging out with her around their apartment. He kissed her once in the morning and once in the afternoon. Jeramey showed Jimmy Jessica\u2019s Instagram, and Jimmy immediately told Chelsea about that conversation to show how little it mattered.

There\u2019s an almost comic double-speak to the conversation. Chelsea complains about not getting enough affection, claiming she received none, while acknowledging that maybe she did get between one and three kisses. There is some kind of amphetamine in the moment where Chelsea talks over Jimmy to announce that she\u2019s a \u201Chuge nurturer.\u201D I had a big stupid smile on my face. The little bit of sense Chelsea had was released from her body. A stupid fight is suddenly a devastating one. Chelsea wants constant reassurance from Jimmy knowing that\u2019s not his preference. She\u2019s asking him to go through the motions and say words mindlessly, just to appease her.

Okay, nice job. One more thing: in this episode of PIMA, there is a goodly amount of frank conversation about various sexual and reproductive topics; if that is a problem in your household, you might want to hit the pause button. And here now is Steve Levitt with a special episode of People I (Mostly) Admire.

LEVITT: People have this romantic idea of the fetus growing inside the mother, and this wonderful symbiotic relationship, but the truth is more like a war. Can you describe the true relationship between the fetus and the mother, as opposed to the idealized ones that we have in our mind?

LEVITT: Now virtually every modern society, every society we know, is patriarchal. Men have much of the power. But you argue that there are clues in the human body that suggest that for much of our evolution, human society must have been matriarchal. Can you explain how you come to those conclusions?

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We're joined by the one and only Jason Calacanis for this very special episode, wherein we chronicle Jason's journey from a kid porter in the barrooms of Brooklyn to building the largest independent media business in tech, becoming the "3rd or 4th greatest seed investor of all-time" (and the original Sequoia Scout), launching one of the top accelerators in the world, and constructing a one-man empire that may just disrupt the entire capital stack in our industry. We dive into how it all ties together, and where the money and power is shifting in the ever changing sands of Silicon Valley...

Who would have thought facilitating payments for Beanie Baby trades could be so lucrative? The only acquisition on our list whose value we can precisely measure, eBay spun off PayPal into a stand-alone public company in July 2015. Its value at the time? A cool 31x what eBay paid in 2002.

David: Acquired is all about stories. Ordinarily, we tell the story of a great technology company, a great leader, or a great adaptation. Today, we are telling the story of someone who doesn't just have one story. He has a whole anthology across all of those categories, the one and only Jason Calacanis. Just to give our audience a small sampling of all of the enterprises that Jason has started and is involved with.

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