Marriage is far bigger and better than MAFS is telling us
THE couples in Married at First Sight are like Colosseum gladiators. We watch the cutting to pieces of another person’s hopes and dreams and call it entertainment, writes Michael Jensen.
Opinion
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I AM the minister at one of Sydney’s prettiest churches, St Mark’s Anglican Church, Darling Point. You may know it as the church at which Muriel got married in Muriel’s Wedding, and where Elton John married Renate Blauel in 1984 (much to Molly Meldrum’s surprise).
Each year we have about 40 weddings, but more importantly for us, we prepare about 40 couples for marriage.
We run a four-week course for the couples in which we talk about the meaning of love, the need to forgive each other, and the way to work on a marriage.
We don’t have to tell the couples that marriage can be a source of great joy, but also of great pain. If we want it to be what we dream, we need to put in the effort.
When the producers of Married At First Sight rang a couple of years back asking if they could use our church in the show, it took about three seconds to say no.
In fact, I think I said “definitely no”, but wouldn’t it have been good publicity (and cash) for the church? Wasn’t Muriel’s wedding a fake wedding too?
I said no because it felt like it would be a betrayal of marriage itself. It would be disrespectful to those couples who are prepared to really work at marriage. What could I then say to John and Philippa, the couple from our church who celebrated their 70th anniversary last year?
Muriel’s wedding was obviously a fiction. MAFS says that it is “an experiment”. Though the weddings aren’t “legal”, the people seem to be making promises to each other that they believe. The contestants say “I am getting married”, not “I am getting fake married”.
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The old marriage service used to say that marriage is “not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly … but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God”.
It didn’t say anything about not getting married to a complete stranger in front of a massive TV audience, but you get the drift.
The hard thing for me is that many of the people on the show clearly really want to be married and are serious about it. And they are prepared to give MAFS a crack, because nothing else seems to have worked.
Why not start with the commitment part (well, sort of) and get off the dating treadmill?
There’s a really deep hunger for marriage. But we ask a lot of our marriages these days.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ernest Becker argues that we now look to romance and love to give us what we used to get from God.
“The love partner becomes the divine ideal within which to fulfil one’s life,” he said.
We don’t just want a lifelong friend, co-parent, and housemate. We want our partner to be our soulmate, and our marriage to provide us with complete fulfilment. We want to marry God!
But the only option we have is to marry a human being. And that will take some hard graft.
An arranged marriage can work, but usually when people have much lower expectations about what marriage will deliver than we in modern Australia do.
Unsurprisingly, MAFS has scored only two lasting relationships in five seasons. MAFS always starts with the person thinking dreamily about how their life is incomplete or empty, and how getting married will fill the void in some way — whether it is Matt the rom-com watching tradie or Jo the single mum from Adelaide.
We are told that the panel of psychologists have used “science” to match the couples to one another.
But this panel sometimes can’t (apparently) seem to see what blind Freddy can see: that they’ve matched a nice and normal person with someone who probably should never be married to anyone. (No names, no pack drill, but let’s just say “episode one”, OK?)
These car-crash matches don’t exactly hurt the ratings, do they?
And at this point MAFS becomes cruel. It’s our own version of the gladiators in the Colosseum. We watch the cutting to pieces of another person’s hopes and dreams, and we are entertained by it.
Marriage is far bigger and better than MAFS is telling us.
We all know that it can enrich our lives. But we need to enter it with our eyes fully open, not naive about the upcoming difficulties, but ready for the effort it will take to make it great.