"Married at First Sight" = Love at First Sight?

“Married at First Sight” is what some are calling a “groundbreaking” new reality television show that debuted this summer on the FYI network. The show features four self-proclaimed love experts who use their skills to pair up six singles who, for some reason, willingly choose to say their “I do’s” to a complete stranger. After featuring the three couples’ weddings, the show then documents each couple for five weeks as they proceed to get to know the person they just married and THEN decide whether or not to get a divorce.  I included a clip of the show’s trailer below just in case you were having trouble believing that this kind of entertainment is actually allowed on television.

When we were having our class discussion last week about the article, “Isn’t it Roantic? Differential Associations Between Romantic Screen Media Genres and Romantic Beliefs”, I know this television show came up briefly but I wanted to discuss it more in depth for my blog post. This new reality show stands out in my mind because it presents a potential new way to look at one of the hypotheses in the article. Specifically, hypothesis three proposed that higher exposure to marriage theme television shows would be associated with stronger endorsement of love at first sight ideology (Lippman, 2014).  Support was found for this hypothesis as well as an unexpected result that higher exposure to marriage theme television shows was associated with higher endorsement of idealization -- the idea that true love will be nearly perfect (Lippman, 2014). When I originally read the results of this hypothesis, I was not surprised. If you’re watching a lot of television that glorifies marriage, it does not sound odd that you would be more inclined to believe in love at first sight and that once you find the right person, you’re love will be almost perfect. But when I thought about a show such as “Married at First Sight”, I started to second-guess how the results of this hypothesis might hold up. Prior to viewing a show like this, the concept of “love at first sight” was always a pretty abstract thing. When, however, it is literally played out in front of you on television as two people agree to bind their love forever after seeing each other for the first time, you start to question how people could buy into such a concept.

I think it is safe to say that a show like “Married at First Sight” is very different from many of the shows included in the research done in this article and articles before it. So my question is, would the results of this study apply to a show like “Married at First Sight”? The show would definitely fall under the “marriage-themed reality show” category but is it possible that frequent viewers of this show would endorse the idea of love at first sight more so than people who don’t frequently watch this show? My initial response is that there is no way that can be true but perhaps that is just me being cynical. In contemplating my position and whether or not these results would also be true for a show like “Married at First Sight” I found it interesting to consider the results of hypothesis five.

Hypothesis five predicted that higher realism, the extent to which viewers see the media as realistic, would be associated with higher levels of romantic beliefs (Lippman, 2014). This hypothesis was supported in the results and suggests that higher realism leads to higher endorsement of the idea of love at first sight (Lippman, 2014). When taking this hypothesis into consideration, I guess it can be assumed that hypothesis three might hold up to a show like “Married at First Sight” but potentially only for viewers with higher levels of perceived realism?  I think it would be interesting to do a similar study to this one but using more radical television shows, such as “Married at First Sight” or even something like “Dating Naked” which are so ridiculous in their content that they seem impossible to buy into. To me, it would appear that even those viewers with the highest levels of realism could not possibly buy into a show like “Married at First Sight” thus challenging the results found for hypothesis three but maybe I have just grown too cynical? Perhaps as television becomes more and more outrageous, it will become more important for research to move away from the cultivation theory-based ideas and propose new codes and scripts that can explain the effects that media outlets can have on viewers. Or maybe it does make more sense to try and ground such radical entertainment sources with more concrete theories like the cultivation theory to try and make sense of them all. Or maybe we should all just sit back, relax, and not even bother to question these shows and their aggressive attempts to entertain us? 

References

Lippman, J. R., Ward, L. M., & Seabrook, R. C. (2014). Isn’t it roamantic? Differential associations between romantic screen media genres and romantic beliefs. Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 3(3), 128-140. Doi: 10.1037/ppm0000034