Married at First Sight: Trusting Science for Love (TV Review)

married-first-sightYou’ve heard of love at first sight, but what about marriage at first sight?

Would you marry a complete stranger if they were technically your perfect match?

Would you watch a show about people in their twenties and thirties doing it?

The FYI television network is banking on you doing just that. Its new reality show, Married At First Sight, is about arranged marriages, and how they play out in modern society. Based on analysis, online exams and physical attraction tests, a panel of experts, including a sexologist, a spiritual advisor, a sociologist and a psychologist, choose the contestants.

Contestants agree that once the match is made, they will marry a complete and total stranger, never having seen them or heard their voice. They discover their future partner’s name at the altar, and, after the ceremony, engage in a traditional wedding reception. The next day, they are sent on a honeymoon, and, upon returning, live together as husband and wife.

As a true skeptic, when I tuned into this show I expected to watch completely unstable people milk their 15 minutes of fame with no regard for the sanctity of marriage.

Instead, I became invested in the stories of millennials so eager to find love that they actually married complete strangers after being intensely analyzed by experts who believe science can pair them better than they can themselves.

Married At First Sight is an extreme form of entertainment, but it’s also an extreme quest to find love, and although we may not understand it, the contestants seem sincere in their search for companionship. Dating is hard, but I’d have to guess that marrying a stranger is harder.

Mostly, I felt guilty because these were people’s real lives, and it had been turned into a reality television show that I was shamefully and thoroughly enjoying. And with every step, I found myself filled with anxiety about what would happen next.

There’s no big pay-off, no million-dollar home, and no trip of a lifetime included as incentive. In the end, you’re either happily married or divorced. And of all the grand prizes to receive on a reality television show, a divorce is at the absolute bottom of the list.

By the end of the third episode I had the three couples ranked according to who I believed would definitely make it, who had a 50/50 chance, and who might be signing divorce papers. Although the contestants reiterated that this was not a game to them, but rather an unconventional quest for finding love, I had turned their marriages into games for myself.

This form of matchmaking disregards the many people in the world who are still fighting for the chance to choose who they love rather than being forced into arranged marriages — without a team of experts using science to find their match.

Has a game been made out of the freedom to choose who we love? Arranged marriages in the United States date back to colonial times, when wealthy people used them to protect land and title and promote financial stability. Still today, in many developed and underdeveloped nations all across the world, having your spouse chosen for you is an unspoken cultural norm. Often, women don’t have much of a choice in their husband unless they want to be shunned by their families or societies, and there’s no such thing as “dating.” When a potential suitor is found and approved by the parents, often the potential mates spend a very short amount of (usually supervised) time together, and return to their parents with a yes or no answer to an engagement.

The presence of arranged marriages among the wealthy and middle class may be attributed to growing up in cultures where one learns to accept it from childhood on. In underdeveloped countries, people who are underage or not in love are put in these kinds of situations. Some see them as a way of escaping poverty; for others, they are the result of unimaginable family pressure. For the very poor and those running under a tighter household regime, there are few choices or freedoms in an arranged marriage.

That being said, is making a television show with its own modern adaptation of arranged marriage a mockery of marriage itself? In the Catholic Church, marriage is a holy sacrament. It’s a vocation or calling from God. Marriage is a permanent union of a man and a woman who have entered into a covenant of love with one another and with God. For both Catholics and Christians of other denominations, marriage is something sacred that is ordained by God.

Married At First Sight is an extreme form of entertainment, but it’s also an extreme quest to find love, and although we may not understand it, the contestants seem sincere in their search for companionship. Dating is hard, but I’d have to guess that marrying a stranger is harder, and likely a last resort for the contestants who seem tired of a hook-up culture. For their sake, (and my emotional sanity as I continue to watch), I hope their marriages work out.

Still, in all this entertaining reality television madness, we shouldn’t forget how truly beautiful marriage can be, especially when we have the privilege of choosing who we love, as so many others don’t. In a nation like ours, it can be so easy to forget that having a choice is still a privilege in this world.