Seen from directly above, the proposal looks like a picture composed for the ceiling. A man kneels and slides a ring onto the finger of a woman in a black sequined dress, seated on a pale sofa, while a lattice of geometric shadows spills across the wooden floor around them, the kind of pattern a carved screen throws onto a room. Candles in glass lanterns and crystal lamps hold the corners of the frame. That is the image Netflix put out for Love Is Blind, Habibi, and it fixes the one moment the format is built to deliver. Everything the new season has to prove comes after it.

Love Is Blind, Habibi is the Arabic-language edition of Netflix’s dating reality franchise, a social experiment in which single men and women talk from separate pods, hearing each other through a wall without ever seeing a face, and decide whether to get engaged before they meet. The second season brings a larger, more scattered cast into those rooms and hands the hosting to a new married couple: Tunisian model and presenter Rym Saidi and her husband, Lebanese television presenter Wissam Braidy, who take over from Khaled Saqer and Elham Ali.

Six engagements, one wedding

The record of the first edition explains why the return carries weight. Twenty singles entered the pods, most of them living and working in the United Arab Emirates, and six couples came out engaged. Only Safa and Mohammad went on to marry. They were still together at the reunion and have since announced that they are expecting their first child. Dounia and Chafic later confirmed they had split. Asma and Khatab broke up after a short stretch of dating outside the show, Hajar and Simo and Nour and Mido separated during the retreat, and Karma and Ammar called off their engagement before the wedding.

Netflix does not present that ratio as a problem to be fixed. Its announcement for the new season puts the question in the same place the first season left it, at the moment the pod doors open: “Can love survive the expectations of family, the weight of tradition and the complexities of modern courtship?” The platform has not announced any structural change to the format, so the test stays the same. What changes is who walks into it.

Twenty-seven singles from twelve countries

The new season widens the room. Netflix has cast 27 singles, 14 women and 13 men, from Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Tunisia, a map that now runs from the Atlantic coast of the Maghreb to the Gulf. The Abu Dhabi daily The National counts Lebanon as the largest group, with six participants, followed by Egypt with five and Morocco with four. Ages run from 25 to 45. The youngest is Ranouna Essafi, a Tunisian head of recruitment and content creator who divides her time between the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The oldest are Omran Quli, a Kuwaiti chemical engineer who owns a boat rental business, and Faris, an Iraqi participant who, unusually for this group, keeps no public social media account at all.

Read the cast list closely and a pattern emerges that sits at an odd angle to the premise. Nour Yahya is a model who has walked the Paris Fashion Week runway for Chanel. Uruk Ashour is an actress. Zeinab Shaaban, a Lebanese dietitian, co-founded a jewellery brand in the UAE, and Hayat, from Bahrain, runs a clothing label there. Talal Al Halabi founded an automotive creative studio that works with CGI and mixed reality, and Karima Chamsi, who calls herself a serial entrepreneur, has walked the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival. A good share of these singles earn their living from how people and objects look. The pods take that currency away first. For a group this fluent in the language of the image, the opening stage of the experiment is a room where the image is worth nothing.

A married couple at the door

The host change follows the logic of the first season, which was presented by the actress Elham Ali and her husband, Khaled Saqer. Netflix again puts a couple in charge, this time Rym Saidi and Wissam Braidy, billed by the platform as a celebrity couple Arab audiences already know. The choice is part of the format’s argument. The people steering singles towards the altar are themselves a marriage the audience can see, a finished picture standing at the entrance to a room where nobody is allowed to look.

What the Arabic edition places at the centre is the family. Outside the pods, the couples face physical attraction, the practical business of building a life together and, above all, their parents’ views and the cultural expectations attached to marriage. Netflix says the new season will again put family and tradition at the heart of the participants’ decisions. With a cast that stretches from Kuwait to Morocco and from Sudan to Lebanon, those expectations will not arrive as a single set of rules. The premise suggests the sharper collisions may come when two families who do not share the same idea of what an engagement commits them to meet across one couple.

Where the format stands now

Love Is Blind began as an American series and has since been rebuilt for audiences in Japan, Brazil, Sweden and the United Kingdom, among others. Habibi’s first season earned an International Emmy nomination, and Netflix named the second in its Arabic-language line-up for the year alongside Dubai Bling, another unscripted series built around life in the Gulf. The first season was shot in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, with engaged couples later spending time at EddeSands, a resort in Byblos, north of Beirut, by the Mediterranean. Netflix has not said where the second season was filmed, which leaves the most visual question about the new episodes, the places these couples will be tested, unanswered until they stream.

The pods can produce a yes; they did it six times in the first season. What they cannot do is carry that yes past the door, to parents who never heard the voice behind the wall and to a face that arrives only after the promise has been made. With 27 singles and twelve national ideas of marriage in the same building, the second season asks that question on a larger scale, and the first season’s single wedding is the only answer the experiment has given so far.

Love Is Blind, Habibi Season 2: release date, episodes, hosts and where to watch

All 10 episodes of Love Is Blind, Habibi Season 2 arrive on Netflix worldwide on Thursday, November 12, 2026. The season is in Arabic and is hosted by Rym Saidi and Wissam Braidy. Its 27 singles, 14 women and 13 men aged between 25 and 45, come from Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Tunisia. The first season premiered on October 10, 2024, followed by a reunion special, and is available on Netflix for anyone who wants to see how its six engaged couples fared before the new pods open. Netflix MENA has released the official trailer for the new season.