Did Married At First Sight Lead To Love After A Month?

When it comes to reality TV, I'm certainly no novice; I know from filler. But this finale had some FILLER, you guys. It can't have always been intended to have a two-hour runtime, could it? The third rehash of Doug's fucking cigarette had to have been added after it was determined that the show was a big enough hit to require fattening up? And did we really need video walkthroughs of the couples' relationships starting with their weddings? We know: we've been watching since the premiere. No one is jumping on this thing just to see who's breaking up -- and, more importantly, who's not BUT SHOULD BE.

Doug & Jamie

In my post after the season's penultimate episode, I suggested that Jamie's constant equivocation about the prospects for her relationship with Doug were pre-emptive strikes to prepare him for what I assumed was the foregone conclusion of her deciding not to stay married to him -- and when the two of them head for their Decision Day meeting with her in a too-short skin-tight dress and platform stilettos and him in a gray t-shirt and two days' worth of beard growth, I figure her gambit has worked. I mean, he definitely looks like he has given up on her/life; it was probably only the last traces of dignity that keep him from showing up in actual sweats, right?

Consider what Doug knows, going in -- at least, based on what we've seen. Jamie hasn't made any declarations of love. She still hasn't had sex with him. She continues to hold The Cigarette Incident over his head. He has zero reason to think she's about to tell him she wants to stay married to him. And the fact that they're going first makes me think the producers expect that we expect this meeting to offer the least amount of suspense of the three so they might as well just get it over with.

But Brian was right: Jamie announces that she does want to stay married. Holy shit.

There are a few ways I can account for this legit shocker.

1. Given how badly things started off for them, Doug and Jamie got an edit that maximized pessimism over their prospects.
2. Jamie, the show's only reality TV veteran, instinctively or calculatedly gave a performance that would give her final decision the greatest possible impact.
3. Jamie still isn't 100% on Doug, but, as Brian put it, "why not leave the ring on and hope for the best?"

Regardless of how we got here, Jamie's seemingly sudden change of heart will make theirs the most highly anticipated segments in next week's reunion special, at least for this commentator. Did they actually make it six more months? I'm not so sure. (And after all that build-up, I hope for his sake that Doug was AMAZING in bed.)

Vaughn & Monet

The only way these two would stay together, I figured, is if she was stubborn that she wouldn't want to admit she couldn't make the relationship work, so when they announce that they've apparently mutually decided to get divorced, it's (a) no surprise, and (b) a relief. Right to the end, Vaughn proved what an intractable dick he is: she finally makes him a full dinner from scratch and he's like, fine, but just doing it once isn't enough? FUCK YOU, DUDE.

I think the reason Monet gives for why things didn't work out -- that "Vaughn needs to live some more" -- might be code for "He doesn't make enough money," or for "He needs to spend more time with adult women who have more going on in their lives than making him the center of their universe like he wanted me to do, so that he understands that his eventual marriage isn't supposed to reproduce the relationship he's had with his mother." Either way, these two were doomed from the start because their self-assessments were so far off, so if nothing else, I hope they've learned from one another what they definitely don't want next time. Whatever he put on his questionnaire, Vaughn -- based on what we saw -- is probably only going to be happy with a twenty-two-year-old who doesn't have enough life experience to get that his expectations aren't reasonable, and/or doesn't have her own established life for him to be jealous of -- and definitely someone who doesn't talk so much that her "bubbly"-ness exhausts him the way Monet's did. As for Monet: as she said, she's pretty independent and seems to have had a full, busy life pre-Vaughn that she's undoubtedly eager to get back to. If she wants to be a mother, she should maybe just Murphy Brown it.

Cortney & Jason

Despite late-season attempts to make him seem more ambivalent, Jason and Cortney's decision to stay together was even less surprising than Vaughn and Monet's divorce. From their first meeting, it has been clear that this was the most successful match of the season. Yes, it's weird that Cortney still hasn't met Jason's mother when they all live in the same borough, and even weirder that, as Brian guessed in the above-linked post, producers weren't just waiting for the finale to make their first encounter a big emotional moment for the couple. Theories:

1. Jason's mother is more ill than he let on and he didn't want her to be on camera.
2. Jason's mother is less ill than he let on but more disapproving of the "social experiment," so it didn't fit the narrative to have her on camera expressing her objections.
3. Both Jason and Cortney decided to wait to introduce each other to their families until after filming ended, in order to underline the legitimacy of their marriage.

Judging by the snippet of Jason in the reunion teaser, I suspect that it's the first; saying that his whole life has changed in the last six months says, to me, more than just that the fire academy is harder than he thought, and more that...you know, his mother passed away. But I've already been so wrong about Jamie and Doug that maybe I should get out of the Married At First Sight prediction game.

And Finally...

A lot of this season has been boring -- events could have been compressed to make the season about half as long, I would say (I mean, the "Romance" episode was a reach, and the two-hour finale is just shameless) -- but with a high-concept show like this, it's always fun to watch the first "class" of participants. I'm glad it got renewed and I certainly will watch, but that group of stars won't have the endearing naïveté these six fools did; having watched Season 1, they'll know a bit more about what to expect, and no matter their intended sincerity and authenticity, they'll inevitably alter their behaviour with that in mind. Hard as it is to believe, someday we'll miss Vaughn's unguarded chauvinism, and we should be grateful that we -- and any potential future mates who might encounter it -- got to see it.