M.A.F.S.

English professor or not, I’m not embarrassed to admit that I’m a Married at First Sight super-fan. I’ve seen every season since the first, and even with its poor rate of successful marriages (maybe better than The Bachelor/Bachelorette, though), I find it fascinating. Why? Because it’s so difficult to predict which couples will stay together…as in real life. And this says a great deal about the way we conduct ourselves in finding a mate-for-life.

Sometimes the pairings on the show are a train wreck (again, as in real life), but the pattern in all the seasons is that the great majority of the couples like and are attracted to their assigned partner at the wedding, and for at least some time after. Many are thrilled, in fact, and touchingly hopeful about their chances, how lucky they are to have found this person, and so on. And then comes the stage of getting to know the other, and you get to see exactly how it crumbles…the doubts, the insecurities, the taking offense and the defensiveness, all the everyday problems of relationships in general. Sometimes they make it through the honeymoon very well, and then it falls apart when they live together for the remaining weeks before they officially decide whether to “stay” married – some have said yes to this and it still doesn’t work, as we find out later. Since the rate of divorce is high in real life, this is an artificial and yet somehow not entirely fake mirror of what we do in romantic relationships even when it’s all done conventionally.

This season the seemingly well-chosen couples seem as happy and compatible as they usually are, but the trouble has already started. One groom lives in an apartment in his parents’ basement, an arrangement he casually sees as a temporary convenience. His bride is uneasy about this “red flag,” and questions him lightly at first. He reassures her that he’s entirely independent of his parents in the house above, has his own private entrance, will move out as soon as he has a reason to. She says “Oh…okay,” but it’s not enough for her. So, what does she do? She circles back to it over and over, telling him this state of things is “off-putting” to her, which is probably an understatement. He reassures her all over again that he’d be happy to move, but you know it’s an issue that will be a deal-breaker eventually, because she has an idea of what a guy she marries will be like, and that’s pretty much that. Now of course we all have, and should have, deal-breakers in relationships (e.g. addiction, wanting or not wanting children, fiscal irresponsibility, etc.), but what this very nice young woman is responding to is not really the practical reality of what he’s been doing, but her ingrained idea of masculinity. Would a guy be as horrified if a woman he dates lives in an apartment in her parents’ house? Would she be labeled “not independent enough”? I’m not sure.

Time and again on this show, the bride or groom keeps circling back to a touchy issue, repeating and repeating the same words, while no progress gets made on figuring out the issue itself. This reminds me a lot of my own marriage, in which issues were rarely explored in any positive way. Eventually a kind of rot sets in, and for the show’s couples, who have to decide the outcome quickly, the roots fail to take hold.

I do wonder if the producers purposely choose brides or grooms who have peculiar habits or “off-putting” circumstances in order to stir the pot, since high drama is the meat of most reality shows (I also watch two of the Real Housewives franchise). But this also resonates with what I see in my experience, my own and my observations of others. I think I’ve learned more from Married at First Sight than I have from reading endless articles and books on relationships and marriage.

Image from Pixabay.com