There’s not a reality show that Black folks dig as a collective more than “Love is Blind.” So, there’s no surprise we had our tendrils dug in on Season 6’s only Black couple: Clayton Gravesande and Amber Desiree “AD” Smith.
My god did those two give us all the brewed tea bags we needed for an otherwise just-okay season.
We wanted the Charlotte, N.C. couple to work: Clay, a fit entrepreneur with a blinding smile, his own crib and willingness to express his emotions; AD, a former NFL cheerleader turned real estate broker and nightclub manager with a bleeding heart and a frame stacked like one of those Giant Jenga towers.
But it was obvious from the pods that the two weren’t aligned. It started with his insistence that physical appearance matters deeply to him. This offended AD, who in her early 30s should’ve understood that not even a show called “Love is Blind” would court an American male with options who doesn’t care about looks.
From there, Clay kept knitting red flags and shipping them to AD via FedEx SameDay delivery: He made several points to express that his work would likely always take precedent over her and was sometimes aggressive in tone in explaining it. But the largest, and most consistent, red flag was Clay’s constant expression of fear of cheating on his wife.
Clay said he was worried that he would follow in the path of his father, who cheated on his mother (because cheating is…hereditary now?) Instead of running, AD, bless her whole heart, tried to allay his concerns.
This appears to be AD’s whole modus operandi: She expressed that she didn’t want to keep getting her heart broken by dudes who didn’t take her seriously and she even acknowledged that Clay was a bright red flag from the word “jump.” But we watched AD make bad decisions multiple times in 4K: that she was even considering that weird white dude Matthew told us what we needed to know about her judgment.
Clay standing AD up at the altar should have been expected from anyone who watched the whole season, but it still messed us up a bit…in large part because the producers let AD go first and say “I do.” (nasty work, y’all). But even when Clay made so many unserious comments about her physical appearance at the altar, we were hoping for his redemption — probably not reasonable considering the “Love is Blind” process takes 38 days from meeting to wedding…barely enough time to find a therapist to process why his ass shouldn’t be standing at anyone’s altar for a while.
On Wednesday night’s reunion show, Clay expressed tons of regret and contrition, saying it was hard to watch and insisting that AD is still the “love of his life.” He said the therapy he’s completed in the last year or so has put him in a better place. His voice even cracked as he talked, resulting in AD physically comforting him.
You know Black folks weren’t gonna let that go unacknowledged.
Even rapper Wale got in on the Clay bashing, for some reason.
There was no naked animus between Clay and AD on the reunion show; her long pause and request to move on to the “next question” when host Nick Lachey asked her if there was any chance for the couple going forward has some believing that they’re still creeping with each other on the low.
If I had to conjecture, I’d say that Clay dragged his happy ass on television to draw attention to his businesses and maybe add another body to the roster in the process. He likely wants to get married someday, but he had to know going in that he wasn’t ready. If I’m correct, it would make Clay the most diabolical time waster of the season and the main villain if Jeramey wasn’t around.
I’d also like to believe that AD 10 years from now would’ve chucked deuces and left Clay in the pods. But that’s an indictment of “Love is Blind:” It attracts 20- and 30-somethings without good sense to make these sweeping life decisions in the amount of time it take to come off new-employee probation at work.
But here’s hoping AD learns something, because good god…