Why Am I Watching Married At First Sight Instead of Planning My Wedding?
While many of my loved ones spent the past year sublimating their rage and sadness into nurtured plants, fresh-baked bread, and deepened relationships, I opted instead to let all my personal habits slide into a sinkhole, replacing them with exactly one new sustainable self-care ritual: a standing Wednesday night date with the cast of Married at First Sight.
For the uninitiated, Married at First Sight (MAFS for short) is a Lifetime reality show that features young singles marrying complete strangers selected for them by a team of relationship experts—and likely a few casting professionals. Each pair meets at the altar for a wedding ceremony, and then embarks on a honeymoon that is somehow both lavish and excruciating. After that, they live as a married couple for roughly two months. And at the end of eight weeks, they reach Decision Day, when each couple reveals whether they want to continue their marriage or get a divorce.
Though Married at First Sight premiered in 2014, I didn’t discover it until Netflix’s algorithm pushed Season 9 on me last spring. Since then, I’ve gone from reality TV dabbler to live-tweeting Married at First Sight so vigorously each week that I’ve twice been credited with popularizing the #MarriedAtFirstSight hashtag. I’m an active participant in two MAFS group chats. And every Thursday night, my fiancé and I lie side by side in bed and listen to a five-hour MAFS recap chat on Clubhouse. Some quick-finger math recently confirmed that I’ve dedicated more time to Married at First Sight than I’ve put toward planning my own wedding. I would be embarrassed if my dopamine levels weren’t so high.
There’s just so much to love about the televised marital experiment: its ridiculous premise, the corny couples activities, and the one bona fide romance that blooms each season. But what really sets the show apart is just how effective it is at replicating the tedium of real-life romantic partnerships.
Most love reality shows end with a proposal, a cash prize, or even a change in citizenship status. MAFS instead begins with the romantic fantasy of a wedding, and then swiftly plops each couple right back into their everyday lives. This reversal introduces a stream of mundane annoyances—forced couples trips, lopsided chore splits, demanding work schedules—that threaten the budding romances. These conflicts sound harmless, especially when compared to the competitive lap dancing and constant temptations you find on shows like Love Island or The Bachelor, but as in real life, it’s often the humdrum stuff that drives couples to embarrassing cries for attention and sloppy attempts at cheating. Most of the clashes on MAFS are life-sized. I’ll be watching an episode, and then suddenly find myself relitigating an argument from two relationships ago, full of fresh perspective. That familiarity is by design. MAFS has the everyday drudgery of life built into it, revealing the incompatibilities and red flags that most other love reality shows are engineered to hide.
Despite the stacked odds, one MAFS couple each season genuinely seems to fall in love. The rest implode, with many of the spouses locking into endless cycles of hostile disputes that keep my favorite Clubhouse chat as juicy as ever. Some couples suffer from abandonment or alarming patterns of codependency. Still, roughly 60 percent of couples on the show opt to stay married on Decision Day, with compatibility playing a minor role in that statistic. On MAFS, and in real life, sometimes the most “successful” couples are simply committed to the institution of marriage, not necessarily each other.
But that’s the thing with MAFS: Cast members are not there to win hearts. The couples are meant to feel each other out, sure, but the show’s true purpose is to assess one’s fitness for the endless, petty conflict of marriage. Catching emotional fades is a point of pride for many cast members. The most commonly uttered phrase on this show might be, “I’m committed to working on this marriage.” An MAFS wife might state some version of that not long after the husband she’s known for a handful of weeks tells her that cutting her hair short without giving him proper notice might be grounds for divorce. A newly minted MAFS husband might console himself with his own designs on commitment, while his bride spends their wedding reception on the cusp of a breakdown, repulsed that she’s expected to be intimate with someone she finds so unattractive. These are examples from two of my favorite couples of the franchise, both of whom seem to still be giddily married! Their love appears to be the real thing, but it was born of duty, not the other way around.
Married at First Sight isn’t all silly squabbles and sex-themed dice games though. The more I watch MAFS, the less I consider it escapism. The show’s biggest issues are fun house distortions of the most toxic aspects of traditional American relationship ideals. The show is aggressively heteronormative: In 12 seasons, MAFS appears to have matched only cishet couples, and gender roles factor heavily into the experts’ advice, particularly from Pastor Cal and Dr. Viviana Coles. There's also a palpable difference in “relationship readiness” between the male and female cast members, a pattern any woman who has dated a man knows to be true in the real world. And when women on the show are paired with manipulative, abusive, or emotionally immature men, the wives are sometimes nudged to excuse or take blame for their husbands’ behavior. I wish production took more responsibility for these instances and that more measures were put in place to keep these women safe. But even that dynamic mimics how our culture treats women in abusive or imbalanced relationships. Sure, MAFS marriages tend to be harder on the wives, but statistically speaking, quite possibly so are most cishet American marriages.
So why do cast members bother? It all comes down to what they refer to as “the process,” the combination of psychological testing, background checks, extensive interviews, and home visits that helps the experts match the couples. The prevailing belief is that if you represent yourself accurately, listen to the experts, and “trust the process,” you’ll live happily ever after in wedded bliss. And if you don’t, there’s a built-in return policy. The show has a long-term success rate of nearly 30 percent, if we’re defining success as the absence of divorce. Nearly 30 percent is not too shabby for a reality show that’s essentially a shot in the dark. And when that near-30 percent includes couples like Greg and Deonna, a sweet, slow-burn pair from Season 9, and Bennett and Amelia, two startlingly kindred spirits from Season 11, that group starts to seem a lot more statistically significant. Plus, it’s not like traditional marriage is exactly bulletproof. In fact, the longer I watch MAFS, the more it becomes apparent that the show treats marriage with the reverence it deserves.
The seductive promise of Married at First Sight is that you can bypass the barbarism of dating, find your perfect match, and emerge in love and battle tested in just eight weeks. Like most relationships, things rarely work out so smoothly, if they do at all. But on the show and in the real world, it’s the outliers that push all of us to buy into another season.
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