Yuen: Love is blind in Minneapolis — if your sister approves

In the Minneapolis-based season of “Love Is Blind,” the power of sibling dynamics reigns.

To paraphrase the immortal wisdom of the Spice Girls: If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my ... sisters?

Sure, Season 8 served up the typical fare of emotionally stunted men, cringey love triangles and over-the-top regional accents. But until now, the series has never leaned so much into the unique bonds we form with our siblings, and how those ties, for better or worse, can strengthen or sabotage our romantic relationships. In Minnesota, apparently, family is everything.

We witnessed the full range of sister tropes. The disapproving sister. The inspiring sister. The skeptical sister. The supportive sister. The jealous sister.

Let’s place Rachel Hastings in the category of the ride-or-die sister. She cheered on her little brother, Daniel, all the way to the altar. He and Taylor Haag were the only couple to tie the knot this season, a relationship fortified by the blessings of their families.

“Anything for my brother,” Rachel, a music therapist from Minneapolis, told me Thursday, days after the season concluded. “My family and I were like, ‘We’re for Daniel.' We’re going to be positive and welcoming and let this thing play out, and perhaps God will bring Daniel his future wife this way. And he did! I’m so happy for them, and I’m honored to be his sister.”

Rachel was also one of the most interesting siblings featured on the show. Born blind, she helped shape Daniel from a young age. She thinks her family innately understood the concept of “Love Is Blind,” in which men and women get engaged without ever having seen each other.

As Daniel explained on the show, “She just loves people without seeing them. If I could just be a little bit like her, that’d be cool.”

But, Rachel said, it saddened her that many of the sibling relationships on the show were cast in a negative light.

If only we earned a dollar for every time Dave Bettenburg threw his sister under the bus for why he couldn’t move forward with his relationship with Lauren O’Brien. His sister allegedly disapproved of the reality-TV experiment and feared Dave would fall for someone strictly in it for the fame. Dave’s sister is never seen in the footage but serves as a foreboding and omnipresent force looming over the doomed relationship.

“Part of what is freaking me out, too, is my sister,” Dave tells Lauren shortly after their engagement. “I don’t want her to freak out. I love her so much. I really hope she can find a way to understand this.”

We also meet Sara Carton’s sister, Lisa, who’s been a role model to her little sister. Lisa is gay. Carton needs a romantic partner who unequivocally backs the rights of the LGBTQ+ community, but fiancé Ben Mezzanga is evasive on where he stands on various social and political issues — perhaps because he’s never had to think deeply about people on the margins. His church’s position on homosexuality isn’t affirming enough for Sara.

Then there’s the jealous sister (at least, as decided by the internet). The couple I was rooting for the hardest, Monica Danús and Joey Leveille, looked like marital-bliss material until Monica’s older sister, Nicolle, entered the picture.

From the get-go, Nicolle was skeptical of energetic Joey, a self-described golden retriever, questioning his genuineness. She also disclosed to Monica that she always imagined that she would be the one getting married first, leading many viewers, and even Joey himself, to suspect that Nicolle might be envious of her little sister.

At the altar, Monica passed on Joey because she wasn’t feeling fully affirmed by him. But the rejection was mutual; Joey said he couldn’t couldn’t completely commit to the marriage because Nicolle never accepted him into the family.

Joey’s sisters had sent gifts to Monica before they even met her, according to a close family friend, Renee of Staples, Minn. (Renee asked that her last name be withheld because of attacks targeting Joey’s family on social media.) The sisters were sad for both Joey and Monica that their excitement about the relationship wasn’t reciprocated by Nicolle.

“They realized all too well how important siblings can be,” Renee said.

At Joey and Monica’s wedding, an empty wheelchair was present in the audience to honor her. “There’s still just a ton of good,” Joey told the wedding-goers, adding that his Chasea would have cherished the journey, too, if she were there.

Many of us would do anything to protect our siblings from bad decisions and eventual heartbreak. They were our first friends. They knew us before we forged our identities or careers. They bore witness to our past and can guide us to our future. I always tell my boys that long after their dad and I pass, they’ll always have each other.

Rachel Hastings said she initially felt nervous and protective of Daniel when she learned he’d be going on “Love Is Blind.”

“But what overrode any of my hesitations is: Daniel is my brother, and I’m going to support him through and through. I’m not going to love him any more or any less based on the decisions that he makes.”

Trained as a classical pianist, Rachel showed her support once again at Daniel and Taylor’s wedding. I got goosebumps when she sang and played the piano to Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love.”