Sometimes I just don’t have the emotional bandwidth to watch a series of Married at First Sight UK, a.k.a. MAFSUK, because it is one of the most stressful and at times blankly horrifying things on TV. All reality dating and marriage shows are a potent mix of boring and stressful, including Love Island, where the holy grail is simply deciding to ‘be exclusive’. But MAFS gets so raw and so ugly, so fast. The only good thing about it is that it puts paid to the ludicrous but increasingly popular idea that arranged marriages are the answer to society’s dating woes.
Darkness nips and bites at all MAFS seasons, and frequently engulfs the whole, an effect particularly visible in the ‘dinner parties’ where the contestants goad and gang up on each other and frequently explode. In most series, there are men so brutish that it is hard not to suspect some dark things going on – impressions usually fostered by tense retrospective references to happenings off camera, and sometimes even the enforced departure of a contestant. Some of the women are also concerningly unpleasant and manipulative.
Darkness nips and bites at all MAFS seasons, and frequently engulfs the whole, an effect particularly visible in the ‘dinner parties’ where the contestants goad and gang up on each other and frequently explode
Some of this MAFS darkness has come into focus this week, with the release of a Panorama investigation unearthing allegations of rape by two of the show’s female contestants, during filming, and one allegation of a non-consensual sex act. The rape claims are ‘serious’ and there must be consequences for ‘criminality or wrongdoing’, according to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The repercussions are ricocheting around the mediasphere: holiday company Tui has paused sponsorship of the show, and Channel 4 has removed it and suspended MAFSUK social media channels. These are stark measures indeed.
Few are surprised to read of this nasty news – least of all show loyalists. One of the reasons it draws a committed viewership is precisely the horribleness of the people it puts together. People whose ambition to be famous and rich fuses painfully with both the quest in hand – to meld two souls through mutual respect, attraction, and affection – and the way that quest is engineered, through the tick-box machinations of three relationship ‘experts’.
As some observers have noted, is it any surprise that if you give strangers a fake marriage, then send them off to a hotel room, some of the men will be emboldened by the old idea that they own their wife’s body? Still others take the view, a distortion of some of the valid criticisms of aspects of Metoo, that the women are making it all up for personal gain – if it was so bad, why didn’t they go to the police there and then?
I’m not sure what’s going on in as systematised as either of these analyses suggest. I think, rather, that the problem comes down to the damaged, bottom-feeding, unreconstructed individuals, whose lives are lived entirely in the wrong bits of the internet, who are fuelled and guided more by dreams of bigger muscles, more protein powder, steroids, tattoos and easy money than by anything approaching human morality. Men like this, with nothing good anchoring them, who are driven purely by a combination of greed, fear and loathing, seem more likely to tend to sexual violence, undeterred by the presence of cameras (and indeed perhaps feeling protected by them).
Certainly, whatever MAFSUK vetting process is in place can’t make up for the lack of the real and only possible vetting process: a slow business of two people getting to know one another, organically. This is why the matches on Love Island, a dating show rather than a marriage show, do so much better if you look at the final marriage numbers. For all that it’s just as calculated and fake, there is more of an organic dimension built into the show.
It is also hard to overstate the dreariness of MAFS, the seediness, the sadness. Unlike Love Island or Too Hot to Handle, both of which take place on lovely exotic islands, these couples are sent from awkward weddings to honeymoon locations that always seem to mock the lacklustre or downright antagonistic bond just forged. There is nothing lonelier than a couple of barely-literate just-married strangers on the make drinking blue cocktails on a beach in the Indian Ocean, with nothing to say to each other apart from arguments about lopsided sexual attraction.
From there, into small homogenous flats in new builds in British city suburbs with nothing to keep you busy apart from the terrible banter and loathing of your irritating, unattractive new roommate who is also your spouse.
Reality romance TV has been subject to intense scrutiny about its safeguarding and care of contestants, particularly after the suicides of former Love Island cast-members, and of its long-term presenter Caroline Flack. The shows have improved their offerings in this regard, with myriad mental health experts on hand throughout, rules, and clear escape routes for contestants.
But you cannot have your cake and eat it too, and a show like MAFS, which depends on desperate people on the make bedding down after fake blind marriages is not going to be all hearts and flowers. It’s going to have its share of monstrosity too. Is this a price worth paying for such viewing kryptonite? For most viewers, and therefore producers, the answer is probably yes. For the victims? Not so much.
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