Exhausted with dating apps and eager to find her match in the D.C. dating pool, GW alum Nina Zafar turned to an unconventional solution: joining the D.C. edition of reality dating show “Love Is Blind.”

Before joining the love-hungry cast, the 33-year-old contestant graduated from GW in 2013, where she completed a bachelors in Near and Middle Eastern studies and began an eight-year relationship with someone she met during her senior year. Zafar, who now works as a social media editor for the Washington Post, said she joined the now-local season of “Love Is Blind” to push herself out of her comfort zone.

“People can have a million reasons for wanting to go on a reality show,” Zafar said. “I don’t think that there should be any judgment involved. It takes a lot of going out of your comfort zone and putting yourself out there to do that.”

The Netflix original reality show tracks singles who converse for 10 days in “pods” — individual rooms where contestants can hear their date but not see each other. The most recent season of “Love Is Blind,” which released in October and included Zafar, was made up of all singles from the D.C. area, though lots of the scenes were filmed in Arlington, Virginia. 

On the show, singles speed date before getting engaged or dumping the person with whom they feel the strongest connection. An openhearted few emerge with a fiancé after their trials in the pods and finally get to see their match. The successful couples are then followed for four weeks, which tends to conclude with either a happy marriage or the demise of their betrothal.

Zafar did not emerge from the pods engaged, which meant many viewers were blind to her presence on the show, in which she appeared just twice despite 10 days of filming. The GW alum said she didn’t apply to join the show but instead responded to casting directors who reached out to her on Instagram asking her to audition.

Zafar was simultaneously surprised and not surprised to be selected since “everyone” in the District knew the producers were actively recruiting potential cast members via LinkedIn and Instagram, and her coworkers encouraged her to join the cast.

Zafar appears mostly in the first episode, speaking to the other women in their compound. Her longest scene, a mere 20 seconds, features her among a group of women encouraging fellow contestant Hannah to break up with Nick D., as they found his natural flirtatiousness a “walking red flag.” After that moment, Zafar does not appear in the show again.

She said she was disappointed with how little airtime she was given in the show but not surprised since she didn’t leave her pod with a fiancé. She wished she had something to show for this “huge thing” she pushed herself to do, Zafar said.

At the same time, Zafar said she was grateful to avoid a negative edit that would have produced fan backlash after seeing the internet’s vitriolic reaction to her cast members, like Hannah, who “Love Is Blind” viewers perceived as an example of an emotional abuser. 

“You go through this whole experience and you’re thinking, ‘Well, what was that for if I have nothing to show for it?’” she said. “Some people that have had really a hard time with how they’ve been portrayed on the show. And so I think, well, maybe it’s best that I wasn’t shown very much.”

Despite her limited airtime, Zafar made “Love Is Blind” history. She said she joined the cast with her younger sister, 29-year old senior marketing manager Tara, making them the first siblings to compete on the show. During her first conversation with casting directors, her sister “naturally” came up “a lot in conversation” as they live together and are very close, Zafar said. Tara also left the show without getting engaged.

“I was definitely much more excited and less nervous to do it when she got involved in the process,” Zafar said. “I just didn’t know what to expect. And obviously having someone to go through that with made it a lot more attractive.”

Zafar said she struggled to lean into the “Love Is Blind” experiment because she couldn’t remove her “journalist hat” due to her media experience and awareness of the producers’ mission to make a “juicy” show by grilling contestants every morning instead of catering to the cast’s feelings. 

“They’re not bad people,” she said. “They still care when we’re stressed and want to make it comfortable for us. I just kept thinking of it as a story, as a show, as drama.”

Zafar said controlled storytelling from the producers shifted how the show portrayed her romantic journey. Zafar said she connected with Bohdan, a 36-year-old tech consultant and Ukrainian refugee. The “Love Is Blind” producers did not show their romance on screen, instead presenting Bohdan as a part of a love triangle with 35-year-old Ramses and 32-year-old Marissa.

Zafar said this narrative felt “weird” as it wasn’t the “truth of the story” and that the true spark was between herself and Bohdan, who left the pods at the same time. According to Cosmopolitan, Bohdan and Zafar left the show dating but not engaged as Zafar was worried about rushing into an engagement, a fear that was only compounded by her feeling “self-conscious” around the show’s cameras.

Marissa and Ramses left the pods engaged, but the latter called off their wedding mere days before the event was scheduled, saying he got cold feet after talking with his family.

Looking toward her current dating life, Zafar said she has let go of the immediate need to find someone after putting herself out there on the show. She said she now looks for the universe to do “its thing” — even though she said that in the world of dating apps, dating “sucks everywhere.”

She said she’s found that this mindset of hoping to find love where you least expect it is what has led most of her friends into relationships.

“I think especially for people that are in college, now that I’m years removed from that, don’t even worry about dating in college,” she said. “Focus on yourself and have fun because you have all your 20s for that.”

Zafar said the central question of the show — if love is blind — wasn’t answered by her experience. She said the timeline of 10 days is not enough for the majority of people to find love but acknowledged the show’s success rate. Except for season two, there has been at least one couple that stays together after filming wraps.

“I don’t want to say that it doesn’t work because it clearly does work for some people,” she said.