Dear Married At First Sight!

Firstly – can we stop calling this a “social experiment”! IT’S NOT! The first two seasons, it was a social experiment. Do you remember that? Show went for about 4 weeks, they got “married”, had a reception, a honeymoon and that was about it. Those “marriages” actually had a chance of survival.

Since then, it has been nothing more than a cheap, ratings grabbing, melodrama, specifically manipulated to create situations that are so unrealistic that Dynasty would be proud to have aired! Relationship “experts”? What a bloody joke! I wouldn’t take my faltering relationship anywhere near them! There main role on this sad show is to match people to be mismatched, thus eliciting the maximum amount of drama out of each relationship. It’s a bit like marital exploitation, really!

And what a disgusting way to portray marriage! By creating the most unrealistic situations possible…things that would NEVER happen in a marriage in the real world…only in the television world. I’d really like to know how many people have group dinner parties with others married on the same day as them! How many have a weekly “commitment” ceremony! Committed to what! They are not even legally married! And how many want to be put through the torture of continuing to pretend a relationship can be worked out because one participant wants to “stay” for another week! I’d be telling the “experts” to fuck off, personally! Then just walk. Not as if you have to worry about a legal divorce! The group bucks and gens parties? Who the fuck does that! Exactly! No one!

How participants can allow themselves to be degraded and exploited by this show is beyond me! If you were sort of desperate, and just went with the flow to get a fuck…I could sort of understand it…but take it seriously…no way! The bitching, rumour-milling, and putting each other down is cringe-worthy. And while it all goes on, the so-called “experts” just sit back and let it happen, instead of stepping in and preventing some of this very damaging behaviour continue! If you weren’t marriage shy when you went into this show, you would be by the time you got out! Even in the heat of an “extra-marital”, there is a camera there, catching every word, every keystroke on a mobile phone, every dirty word muttered! Just like in real life…not!

The truth is – these relationships don’t stand a chance. They are set up for a fall. Contrived matching, contrived situations, forced situations that would never happen in a real marriage, massed bitch sessions disguised as dinner parties, and just a total pretended of marriage, with no grounding in what really happens within a marriage! It truly degrades and belittles the real institution of marriage. As a gay man who has spent decades fighting for the right to have same sex marriages recognised as legitimate relationships with all the benefits and privileges of straight marriages…I find this show totally offensive, as its banality and shallowness makes me wonder…if this is how straight marriage is portrayed, then why was our fight so hard! Why were we denied the opportunity to be as banal as straights?

This show just needs to stop…but we all know that as long as it sucks in a huge proportion of female viewers…who, by the way, are the only people who comment on it on the IG page…then, as a ratings grabber, it ain’t gonna happen.

One can only hope that the true institution of marriage can withstand this cheap onslaught of exploitative rubbish!

Tim Alderman ©️2019