Love Is Blind has a real diversity problem this season, but creator Chris Coelen tells Entertainment Weekly that wasn’t intentional.

Netflix’s reality dating series — where singles get engaged without ever seeing their partner, and then rush down the aisle for a wedding only weeks later — returned for season 8 on Valentine’s Day with six episodes that all take place in the pods. And while the Minnesota season has the largest cast to date — adding two more singles to make it 32 total — it’s also the least diverse.

Over the first seven seasons, Love Is Blind featured casts that were about 50 percent non-white contestants overall, but this one is only around 30 percent non-white — a fact that is glaringly obvious while watching montages of an abundance of white brunette men date in the pods.

“Well, the show casts itself,” executive producer and creator Coelen tells EW. “We put people in the pods, and you try to have a very diverse group of people in lots of different ways [at the start]. And then the people who get engaged are the people who get engaged. The people who fall in love are the people who fall in love. If you’re sort of trying to tick a box, there were lots of people who were in the group coming into the pods who ultimately just didn’t find their person and who we didn’t choose to [follow].”

The creator explains that it’s difficult to feature a cast member in episodes if he/she doesn’t make any connections with anyone. He did expand the pod episodes to feature stories of couples who didn’t get engaged. It’s important to note, however, that most of those couples were white.

“It’s like [how] we chose to tell the Madison-Meg-Mason-Alex story because it felt really worthwhile telling,” Coelen says. “There are 32 stories times however many people each person dates. So if each person starts off dating 16 people, do the math, that’s, I don’t know, close to 1,000 stories? Something like that. And you can only tell so many of them.”

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Coelen says that their goal is always to start the season with a diverse cast and then see how the relationships and connections unfold naturally.

“We always, always, always strive to seed the pods for the greatest possible success, and within that, diversity of not only ethnicity or race, but backgrounds, and financial status, and body types and looks and all that stuff,” Coelen adds. “You’re less concerned about that, to be honest, than just trying to have a group of people that you hope are somewhat compatible and then seeing what happens. And like I said, then they cast the show for us. We don’t decide, ‘Oh, this is a good couple. That’s a good couple.’ We don’t steer it in any way. They figure it out on their own.”

The first six episodes of Love is Blind season 8 are streaming now on Netflix. Episodes 7-9 debut Friday, Feb. 21; episodes 10-12 come out Friday, Feb. 28; and the finale streams Friday, March 7.