So here’s a sentence I thought I’d never write: I’m watching Married at First Sight. Before you close the post in disgust there’s a couple of things I want to clear up.
Firstly, I would never normally watch a show like this. It’s not the trash factor I object to. I’ve been known to watch Kitchen Nightmares, Gogglebox and Geordie Shore, so clearly trash doesn’t put me off. It’s the hetero-normative, patriarchal preoccupation with the imperative to meet a mate of the opposite gender and marry them, as though there are no other possibilities that could generate pleasure and contentment – like staying happily single, coupling without the contractual arrangements, or falling for someone of the same gender – to name but a few.
The other, related reason I’d not be inclined to watch something like this is because the idea of being married at first sight, or swapping your wife for someone else’s, or competing with other girls or guys to ‘win’ your spouse seems to me to undermine the supposed sanctity and seriousness of marriage. And yet not a peep from the Bernardi’s and Abetzes of the world who are determined to deny people, like my friend who has lived with her female partner for 25 years, the chance to get married. Somehow it’s ok for a hetero couple to marry as an experiment for our entertainment, but it’s not ok for gay and lesbian people to make a serious commitment before the state and the deity of their choice. That’s fucked.
I got sucked in after a friend pointed out that I had a distant acquaintance with one of the participants. For that person’s sake and my own I’m not going to say who. Suffice to say I was curious.
Here’s what’s happened so far:
The premise of the show is that a group of ‘experts’ (whose professional reputations are surely shot) review the profiles of a number of singles and make four matches. The matches are based on things like personality, values and, bizarrely, a response to each other’s odour determined by a whiff of an unwashed item of clothing. Once the matches are announced no time is wasted before the weddings kick off.
I loved the bride who raced back to the car to skull a glass of champagne for the courage to go through with her marriage to a complete stranger. Funnier still was the bloke who, as his bride walked down the aisle, was heard to exclaim ‘Shit! This is not what I ordered.’ Charming. One of the weddings was on a boat in Sydney Harbour. The bride seemed to become sea sick as soon as she sighted her prospective husband, flawed by the fact that there was no immediate ‘spark’.
If you’d been playing a drinking game in these episodes the money phrase would have been ‘I can’t believe we/I am doing this!’ as though they’d been unaware until they arrived at their wedding that people would be expecting them to marry a stranger. Despite their incredulousness they all went through with the marriages.
In the second week we joined our newlyweds on their honeymoons. Here the producers created the impression that sparks started to fly between the couples. One husband, having done a very poor job of appearing resigned to the wall of pillows his new wife laid down the middle of the bed each night, was clearly delighted when the wall came down. We moved from what were evidently very chaste smooches on the wedding night (they had just met, after all), to lingering kisses with tongue involved. For drinkers, a sip for every pash in the water would have had you tipsy by the end of the show.
Once the honeymoons were over our couples returned home and commenced living together. For three of the couples that meant the wife moved into her husband’s home – including one woman who moved interstate to live on a farm at the same time as planning a regular commute back to Sydney to keep running her cleaning business. Predictably, by the end of this episode she was finding the travelling time consuming and wondering how she could keep up the arrangement. Challenges for other couples included finding room in the cupboards for storing all of their clothes (ho hum) and one man meeting and learning to live with his wife’s two dogs.
Most amusing was the wife moving out of her parents’ home for the first time. She demonstrated her growing affection for her new husband by going to the shop and preparing her first ever meal (not just for him but for anyone!). Drinkers could have been very merry if they’d sipped every time she called her mum for advice about cooking lasagne – like should you peel a zucchini? They’d have been hammered if they also drank when someone referred to her ‘stepping outside her comfort zone’ by going to the shops and cooking a meal!
The show is kind of amusing but, to be honest, I get to the end of each episode thinking, surely, that must be it. But then they advertise next week’s shows and the whole thing goes on. I know I could stop watching. I haven’t ruled that out. But I do feel a kind of commitment – like you might feel to finish a book that doesn’t grab you from the first page or chapter. Life is too short to watch much of this kind of shit but I’ll probably see this one through to the end – which is more than I think I’ll be able to say for any of marriages.
