here’s a little background of the show if you’ve never heard about it as you’re busy leading a productive life and couldn’t be bothered wasting your precious time watching people’s dramas unfold episode by episode, week by week:
basically, the show is just that: married at first sight.
two strangers are united through an arranged marriage set up by a panel of “experts” (and i put that in quotation because sometimes i wonder if these people even know what they’re doing. or if they’re just pairing couples up for ratings.) who supposedly study their personalities and cross-reference it with neuroscience and shit like that and based on some scientific equation determines whether the couples are a perfect match. so they live together as a married couple, except that they’re pretty much funded on producers’ money so their honeymoons and living expenses for the duration of the show is pretty sweet.
along the way, they get to know their partners better and see if they click or not.
some couples do, some don’t. which leads me to the realization that sometimes it’s the luck of the draw. i mean, if you’re gonna be paired with a male stripper, you pretty much got the long end of the stick. and not in a good way. because that comes with A LOT of baggage and trust issues that i sincerely doubt if such a partnership would be successful outside of reality tv.
but you know what, i think it’s really up to the couples to make their relationship work. (because, duh!) there’s no such thing as a perfect relationship and it’s sad how a lot of people expect fireworks all the time.
there’s this guy on the show, anthony. a lot of people probably hate on him because he’s not afraid to speak his mind. very outspoken. he can be quite blunt to a point of rudeness but i get him. i think because i see a little bit of jeff in him as well. and i mean that in a neutral way. he seems like a practical guy with very traditional values. and i like how nadia keeps him in line in her own quiet way. needless to say, she reminds me of myself too.
sometimes, when jeff joins me on the couch to watch the show, we ask each other if we’d work out as a couple if we were put on the show. the answer is, i don’t know.
because who knows? even the experts can’t get it right 100% of the time. i wonder if they have awesome marriages themselves.
but considering our differences and how opposite we can be, we kind of clicked. so i guess it’s all about working out your issues and knowing which shit you’re happy to put up with and which ones you consider a deal-breaker.
for as long as you don’t hate each other majority of the time, you’re alright.
the pauses between 
My wife’s from India, where arranged marriages are still the norm — for awhile I thought that arranged marriages had the benefit of the couple not having any pre-conceived expectations, and so were better off working out their differences, but over time I noticed they have about the same success rate as love marriages for being happy & fulfilling.
I think it really is luck of the draw whether you and your partner are willing to work through what comes up, or if it just pushes you away. Both my wife and I are stubborn, and had a rough first few years of our marriage. That seems normal though, especially since people are complicated and different, and living closely with someone brings out your worst (plus your partner is such an easy target to blame when the world isn’t going the way you want.)
It seems like those that are willing to work through stuff are the ones that have satisfying relationships in the end.
there’s this show on tv i found intriguing. it was about arranged marriages. just like every other couple with all their individual differences, you could see their struggle in trying to make the relationship work, especially in the beginning. but one good point i saw in the case of arranged marriages (as far as the ones i saw on that show, anyway) was that the couples had the support of both families so somehow, they had each other’s families to back them up. and in the end, it was really up to them to strive to make their marriage work.
that show taught me that marriages, whether arranged or not, really boils down to the commitment of both partners to make their relationship work in the first place.
in a sense, i reckon love is something that you can cultivate through time. a slow and gradual process. none of those massive fireworks where couples eventually crash and burn.