Till the sheer idiocy of it us do part
IASKED my partner to marry me after three weeks of acquaintance, so it would probably be hypocritical to be judgmental about local reality show Married At First Sight. And yet here I go! The show — in which complete strangers meet on the day when they marry each other — gives me the creeps.
Producers call the show a “unique social experiment”. It definitely is an experiment, in the sense of “how large an audience can car-crash viewing of this kind attract”. The idea that it has some other lofty anthropological purpose is much harder to justify. For one thing, this “unique social experiment” is by no means unique. If you really want to know whether two strangers can be thrown together and make a love match, you have centuries of arranged marriages to look at.
Like many dubious ideas, this one comes to us from the US. It has since spread around the world. An Australian version of Married At First Sight is proudly produced in a country where same-sex marriage is still illegal — and people say it’s gays who are destroying the sanctity of marriage.
One of the problems with transplanting this concept from abroad is that it fails to take into account any South African cultural practices around marriage. Twitter users have been asking some hard questions about how lobola works in this context. The family of local groom Pfarelo looked particularly unimpressed at his wedding. His granny sat there with a face like thunder, and she didn’t seem like a woman you wanted to mess with.
The six couples on the South African show have been matched by a relationship expert, a psychologist, a sex health specialist, a financial expert and 702 radio host — sorry, “life expert” — Sam Cowen. After the second episode I was left wondering whether they had simply paired people by approximate skin tone. That episode saw the couples get married in some faux-Tuscan wedding complex in Midrand. It didn’t seem like a promising beginning.
The reactions of some spouses to each other were too ambiguous to read. When Pfarelo met his bride Tsepho at the aisle, he had a look on his face like he couldn’t believe his luck — but whether he thought that luck was good or bad was unclear. More straightforward was the response of bride Kay-Leigh to groom Wesley: she grabbed her sister and hustled her away to hiss: “He just wasn’t what I was expecting!” Wesley, for his part, told the camera slightly desperately: “I hope we get chemistry.”
They have six weeks to figure out if they stay together or become young divorcés. In the week of Valentine’s Day, the show’s a great ad for the single life.