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He’s matched with Shareen, a 47-year-old mother-of-three and events organiser who bemoans that marriage is the one thing she’s been “unable to attain”, as though it’s some kind of advanced diploma. This year on Married at First Sight we meet David, a 56-year-old father-of-two and a prepper (he prefers to think of himself as a “boy scout”) who describes his participation on the show as the “one shot to find the person I’ve been looking for really for my whole life”. They say they cannot forge a “deep connection” with anyone when everyone suspects there’s someone even better out there, just a Tinder swipe away. They blame online dating and hook-up culture. They are all almost pathologically committed to finding “The One” but have lost all hope of doing so. But the couples matched on shows such as Married at First Sight and Love is Blind say they feel overwhelmed by the choice, and the responsibility of choosing. Most young people in the West enjoy historically unprecedented freedom and choice over who to marry, or whether to marry at all. Married at First Sight is one of several exploitative, completely addictive reality TV dating shows that tries to remedy its participants’ dissatisfaction with modern dating culture by reinventing arranged marriage. As a result they have this year recruited “a brand-new team of elite matchmakers”, who have found four unlucky-in-love singletons desperate enough to marry a stranger, who they will meet for the first time on their wedding day.
#Arranged marriage tv shows series
The British version of the international reality TV series has never successfully matched a couple. Over 7,000 people applied to star in the fifth series of Married at First Sight – an astonishingly high number given the limited appeal of having your heart broken live on national television.