Most dating shows are about competition, but Sat.1 marries couples who see each other at the altar for the first time. Can this work?
Most marriage-at-first-time contestants don’t realize their mistake until it’s too late. Berliner Zeitung
German television has been doing quite a lot with love since the late 80s. That’s when resourceful television producers realized that the courtship behavior of singles willing to mate is good for entertainment. The dome show was born. In 1987 Rudi Carrell’s “Herzblatt” flickered across screens for the first time and promptly became a ratings hit. Since then there has been no stopping the general conditions of dating shows. Whether at work (“Bauer sucht Frau”), naked (“Adam sucht Eva”) or with the intervening “Ex on the Beach”, several participants always court a person from whom they hope no less than themselves to fall in love with her.
The competition is the suspense catalyst of all dating shows, with one exception: the Sat.1 show “Hochzeit auf dem first Blick”. For nine seasons now, singles have lined up to tie the knot on a first date with a total stranger. “Scientific” methods are used to ensure that mating is as successful as possible, and a high degree of agreement with previously asked criteria should enable the couple to have a long and happy alliance.
Love degenerates into a consumer good
From the interviews with the participants, we learn that basically everyone expects the same thing from the experiment: love, closeness, security and finally someone with whom you can share everyday life. Insecurities are to be eradicated by the psychologically trained dating experts. The question of whether you fit together is superfluous. First the wedding, then love, that’s the promise of the arranged marriage. Weren’t we further along? Actually yes, but love is in bad shape in times of capitalism, warns the sociologist Eva Illouz. Because today’s feelings are strongly influenced by the laws of the market. Love is increasingly becoming a consumer good.
With Tinder and Co., your own market value is put on display and accordingly exchanged for erotic-emotional encounters. Like a commodity subject to constant evaluation and rejection, the love-thirsty single throws himself into the dating market. However, the cold economy of stimuli tires and frustrates quickly because it is so superficial and therefore often disappointing. All TV formats with the competitive approach basically show exactly this economization of the partner search. A lot of people don’t mind that. So it seems almost logical to simply skip all this fuss and leave the analysis of your own market value to the matching experts from “Marriage at First Sight”.
For the idea that you can learn to love each other if only the key data are right and the will is there, the entertainers are reviving a millennia-old practice that is still considered a recipe for success in some cultures today. In India, for example, marriage arranged by parents is still common. Instead of the really big feelings, it is primarily about economic or status interests. For 90 percent of Indian married couples, falling in love was never an option, and their personal happiness and the existence of their marriage rarely depend on it. Maybe a reason these weddings aren’t as tearful as ours. In “marriage at first sight”, on the other hand, there is a lot of crying, even before the wedding. For example, during the fitting or when the future spouses write a letter that usually doesn’t say much more than: “Hey, it’s about to start. Are you excited too?” This raises questions, because these tears can have nothing to do with the future partner, whom you don’t even know yet. The contestants are apparently touched by their own love performance.
The problem of pseudo love
We see what Erich Fromm calls “pseudo-love,” a phenomenon that the philosopher and psychoanalyst explained in his 1956 book The Art of Loving: “The essential thing is that love is only in the imagination and not in the here and now being in a relationship with a real other person.” He explains below why people still cry after marriage, but now for different reasons: “As long as love is a daydream, you can share in it as soon as but when it becomes reality and it is now a question of the relationship between two real people, they freeze to ice.” In the case of the wedding experiment on Sat.1, the marriage is unfortunately already legally binding at this point in time.
In 2018, a bride realized at the registry office that she had made a serious mistake and immediately informed her baffled, newly wed husband. All the other couples on the show go on their honeymoon after saying yes and don’t really know how to behave. Surprise! Because now those involved notice how absurdly contradictory the whole undertaking actually is. The stranger next to them is suddenly connected to them with this charged “love” and theoretically also in “eternity”, and the protocol stipulates that one now behaves accordingly, i.e. the marriage is consummated with gestures and kisses or even coitus.
You can hardly look at this marital smear theater, which lacks any emotional basis. The life-scripted rampage to the spouse now reveals the unemotional truth: love cannot be hijacked, not by science and certainly not by German television. This is of course bitter and leads to tears of disappointment. Sometimes pseudo-love even saves one or the other couple through this phase, because those who are only pseudo-in love look away from the current state of love and hope for better days. The main thing is that you feel less alone and the quota is right.
“Marriage at First Sight” runs on Mondays at 8:15 p.m. on Sat.1