With the proliferation of dating shows like Married At First Sight and Love Is Blind, a common complaint is that they make a joke about marriage and that people want a sponsorship deal rather than an actual legal spouse.
Well, come in The ultimatumwhere people really, really want a spouse but don’t really care who it is.
I binged the available episodes Netflix‘s latest reality series, presented by Nick and Vanessa Lachey, with the slogan “Marry or Move On”.
The eight heterosexual couples are on the show because one (usually the woman, in two cases the man) gave the other an ultimatum – propose to me or we’re done.
They switch to another partner for three weeks before deciding if they actually want to be with the person they arrived with. Sounds super healthy, right?
It’s classic reality drama fodder, but since I tend to read way too much into these reality shows, a few things caught my eye while watching from my bed.
Of all these couples, only one person is in their 30s, with the rest in their early to mid-20s, one woman who is extremely sick of demanding a ring is only 23. No couple has been together for more than two and a half years – cue boys across Ireland who have been with their girlfriends since high school and move awkwardly under their gaze.
These ultimatums come at a time when most people are still dating and most couples would consider the next step of living together or perhaps adopting a pet.
The other key point that stands out is that these candidates, who are so eager to marry their partners that they would drag them to a Netflix show to demand hardware, don’t seem to really like them.
The moment they recruit a new man or woman into the experiment, they complain not only about snoring or constant talking, but also about their personality values while saying out loud that this newcomer they’ve been dating living together for half a week, this actually might be perfect husband-wife material (because of course they haven’t learned to eat their toenails or voted for Trump yet).
The ultimatum is a means of fetishizing marriage. We look at it love is blindwhere candidates propose without seeing their future spouses, or Married at first sightwhich delivers what it promises and, in my opinion, devalues marriage far more than meets the eye island of lovewhere sexual attraction is paramount.
These people do not necessarily want to marry their partner. They only want a man or a woman.
I’ve never been married and it’s not my priority, but I can understand why someone would want so badly to marry the person they love. It’s a beautiful thing to show the world how much you love someone and to celebrate that union, on top of the legal rights that come with it.
But jeopardize your relationship after almost three years because you only want the marriage, not the person? Doesn’t sound very much like love to me unless you’re talking about being in love with the idea of something.
Surely, if you really, really want to marry someone — the pinnacle of love for many people — it means you love that person enough not to push them down the aisle so much that you explain your sex life to Nick Lachey need global streamer.
https://www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/mocking-marriage-with-the-spectacle-of-a-dating-show-41532143.html Mocking marriage with the spectacle of a dating show
