NEW YORK, NY.- Tom Stroud, a 38-year-old advertising consultant, sits on the floor of a 12-foot-square room on the reality dating show “Love is Blind: U.K.,” facing a blank wall. On the other side is Natasha Waters, a 32-year-old job counselor, who has just told Tom that he’s everything she’s looking for in a man. He’s flattered — but he needs to let her know that he’s interested in somebody else.

“I can feel how good you are,” he begins tentatively. “Um ... but ... I’m thinking about, sort of, um,” he trails off. He stares off into the distance, sighs heavily, fidgets with a ballpoint pen. “I need to be really honest with you ...” he says, after a long pause. “I don’t know if it’s romantic love ... it could just be friendship.”

It may be no surprise to learn that Stroud is from Britain. This is, after all, the country’s archetypal reticence on display — a contrast to the freewheeling earnestness and candor of the six seasons of the American version of “Love is Blind.” The greater emotional restraint of contestants on the spinoff show is one aspect that makes it extremely, unmistakably British.

Nazleen Karim, the showrunner and an executive producer of the series, acknowledged that this inhibition had been a possible concern. “Initially, we were like, ‘Will the Brits be able to emote and be as effusive as the U.S. cast?’” she said in a recent video interview.

“We knew the format of the show was so strong, and that the emotion would get there, but part of us was thinking, ‘Will they be able to do it? Will it take them more dates?’” Seeing that process play out against “the stereotype of the stiff upper lip,” she said, was part of the attraction of taking the show’s format outside the United States.

That format, in which a group of men and women conduct a series of blind dates from different pods to decide whether to get engaged before meeting in person, builds on the success of other American shows, such as “The Bachelor” and “Married at First Sight,” that have combined marriage with reality TV. The most popular British show in the same style, “Love Island,” is not centered around wedlock.

David Cheesman, the series editor on “Love is Blind: U.K.,” said that cultural differences had an effect on the age of the contestants. During the British casting process, he said, the producers found that potential participants who were ready to commit to marriage tended to be in their mid-to-late 30s, “a little older” than American contestants. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average age for first marriage in the United States is about 30 for men and 28 for women; in England and Wales, according to a 2018 report, in opposite-sex couples, it was about 38 for men and 36 for women.

“Love is Blind: U.K.” is also loaded with references to British culture: There are conversations about long-standing soccer rivalries, jokes about Blackpool and the London club Cirque le Soir, and even an impromptu singalong to a tune by British singer-songwriter Craig David.

“Primarily, we wanted to target a U.K. audience, and then hope that the world would potentially follow,” Karim said. “That’s our unique selling proposition, leaning into the Britishness of it all: our unique humor, our banter, turns of phrases. It’s what we know that our people would like.”

The American production of “Love is Blind” is the subject of several lawsuits filed by former contestants. One sued for false imprisonment; another sued for compensation after alleging that she and other contestants had been paid less than minimum wage. The British version, which has a different production company, has tried to distance itself from those disputes, and Karim said the lawsuits had not affected their approach.

“Welfare was front and center,” she said. “You’re asking a lot of these people.”

Psychologists and a welfare team were made available to the contestants before, during and after the production, Karim said, adding that she had been particularly concerned to check in with the cast after the show.

For the production team, the season’s big question was not whether any of the contestants would wind up happily married, Karim said, it was whether they could overcome the hurdle of British reticence and express their emotions on screen. In the end, “we were pleasantly surprised,” she added.

For Stroud, on the floor of his pod, that meant coming clean to Waters and, later in the same episode, asking Maria Benkh, a 30-year-old markup artist, to marry him.

His proposal is full of stops, starts and moments of hesitation. But — in a uniquely British way — it’s also undeniably romantic.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.