I really didn’t think I was going to write about the latest season of “Married at First Sight,” but its final episode refuses to leave my head. Which is strange, because throughout this painfully dull season, I could barely make it through a full episode.
“Why are you doing this to yourself?” Ran would ask whenever he walked through the living room and caught me in the state he hates seeing me in most: sprawled on the couch reading an old Harlan Coben thriller while listening to “Married at First Sight” with my other ear.
(Illustration: Lavia Tushinsky, created using artificial intelligence)
That’s what I had reduced a show I once wouldn’t have dared miss a single frame of to: a bad relationship podcast. Just another one where two single women with crooked bangs sit in a pink studio debating that fresh, surprising question of who should pay on a first date.
“It depresses me to see you like this,” Ran said. “Turn off the TV already and focus on your book.”
And he’s right. This really isn’t what I promised him. When we met, I gave him the best version of myself. I was a bright red firework, bursting with life and passion. I had all kinds of grand plans for our future together. We would spend a month in Nova Scotia and have nonstop sex in a tent in the middle of a lightning storm.
And 16 years later, this is what he got: a woman who switches off her brain and lets it drift from one piece of garbage to the next.
In a way, that is exactly the problem with “Married at First Sight.” It also promised to show us what true love looks like, and in its eighth season it failed to deliver.
Which brings us to the finale, where we learned where the couples were a year after filming ended. It turned out that three couples had managed to stay together.
There were Sophie and Dor, the season’s resident mom-and-dad couple, who really did end it with a baby. There were Tomer and Laiky, a charming pair of geeks who spent the entire season grappling with the question of attraction. And there were Neta and Avia, the military couple who, to me, were probably the most moving thing about this season. Since October 7, both have been dealing with post-traumatic stress, but each handles it differently.
So I sat there watching the couples who had managed to stay together, waiting the whole time for that climax I know from Disney movies. What an incredible love these two have, I wanted to think. Surely they will live happily ever after, with birds singing on their shoulders.
Except that this season, despite being considered a success and setting a record with no fewer than three couples still together, that climax never came. When the episode ended, I was left with a sour feeling, as though I had wanted a cream cake with cherries and settled instead for a sad tub of Greek yogurt.
Yes, a faint and depressing air of compromise hung over the “Married at First Sight” grand finale.
It starts with this problem: Every couple that managed to stay together had broken up immediately after the show. In other words, there had already been a breakup between them, one that left a major fracture inside their love.
And yes, I know all the things people say: “The most beautiful love is the kind with a crack in it.” Usually, those people also bring up that Japanese metaphor, saying relationships like that are just like kintsugi pottery, the Japanese pieces considered especially beautiful precisely because of their cracks.
“What kintsugi now?” I think every time one of my friends lectures me about how it’s perfectly fine to be a couple that is more on-again, off-again than a toaster.
Breaking up after two months is not like a crack in porcelain. It is a crack in your trust, in your sense of security.
Go ahead and tell yourself you’re kintsugi after he leaves you with no warning, just gets up and says something vague like, “I just can’t feel enough.” You will always remember that he was capable of walking away from you, and something inside you will always be afraid of him, seeing him as someone capable of shattering you again.
But the show’s team of psychologists didn’t talk about that. They simply sat there glowing, proud of all the couples they had managed to match.
I should say that, unlike many viewers, I believe the experts want the happy ending just as much as the audience does. What does make me shake my fists at the screen and want to rip off their compassionate therapist sweaters is the word they used with insane generosity throughout the entire show: work.
Yes, they kept saying things like how important it is to work on the relationship. You did the work. You worked so beautifully.
They were so impressed by the couples’ astonishing capacity for work that at some point I wanted to stand up and scream at the television: “Wait a minute, these are two young, beautiful people who have known each other for a month. They are supposed to be at the stage where they are climbing all over each other like koalas nibbling lovingly on each other’s little ears. So why do you keep talking about them as though they’re two laborers rolling boulders around a forced-labor camp in China?”
It’s not that, after all these years in a relationship, I don’t understand that every relationship does indeed involve some work.
Still, I find it hard to believe that a couple who began their life together with enough breakups and reunions to open a departures hall at Ben Gurion Airport will ultimately have enough energy left for the battles of child-rearing and everyday routine.
There is a reason that at the end of “Casablanca,” the hero tells the heroine, “We’ll always have Paris.”
It isn’t only the real Paris. It is the metaphorical Paris. Paris as that golden beginning of a relationship, fragrant with daffodils and croissants. Something to cherish, something to return to when things get hard, something that keeps you from giving up because perhaps the two of you can still have Paris again.
And that’s not even the whole problem.
In all three cases, the rebellious partner who decided to leave was the man, while the person who sent the message or initiated the meeting in an effort to get him back was the woman.
And yes, I’m prepared to accept that this is how things are in our time. Men of this generation have lost all motivation and drive to pursue women. They get their release from porn and, as a result, show up to dates not even particularly horny. In other words, they no longer even have the ambition to score sex, the very thing that turned generations of men before them into champion courters.
And at any given moment, they have another million women to choose from on a dating app. That, too, has robbed them of the instinct to conquer.
So what exactly is a young, strong, successful woman supposed to do? Not try to manage the little weakling she happens to like and steer him in the right direction?
But in this season of “Married at First Sight,” we aren’t talking only about the initial courtship, about giving the man a small, gentle push until he realizes being with you is actually worth it.
Here, we’re talking about actually bringing the guy back after you broke up because he caused problems.
With Neta and Avia, the two officers, we didn’t exactly get an explanation. But from what we know of Avia, who really is an amazing guy but also has a psyche more complicated than “The Da Vinci Code,” it seems pretty clear that he once again retreated into some inner well of his to be alone.
“We both realized it was too hard,” Neta said.
That didn’t stop her from inviting him to her apartment a few months later. Just for a friendly meeting, she said, while the camera showed her made up as if she were about to attend the Oscars. Because that is obviously what women always do when a male friend comes over, right? Scrub the apartment spotless and arrange a tiny altar of treats for him on the table.
Worst of all was what happened to the season’s most promising couple: Sophie and Dor.
Sophie got pregnant, and Dor, who had already been the more hesitant one in the relationship, panicked and decided it was too much for him. He left their shared apartment and went back home to the Krayot in northern Israel. That is where he spent most of Sophie’s pregnancy.
And here is something I have absolutely no doubt about: If the man I loved left me while I was pregnant, I would sic my dog on him and bring in my brothers as reinforcements if he ever dared show his desperate face around me again.
But not angelic Sophie, who decided to forgive him.
I want to believe that everything worked out as well as possible for all three couples.
And yet I want to talk about the thing I have been unable to stop thinking about since that finale.
Let’s say I can swallow the idea that women are now expected to initiate and pursue men at the beginning. Am I also supposed to accept that a man can behave absolutely terribly and that it is somehow fine for you to do everything possible to get him back?
Take a man who spent the entire relationship openly questioning whether he wanted to be in it, who never stopped behaving as though he were some wild animal who simply needed solitude and space, never mind that he works in high-tech and comes home every evening at 7 to the same protein omelet.
Does it really make sense that you should be the one to bring him back after he managed to drive you into breaking up with him?
A man agreeing to be with you is one thing. A man wanting to be with you so badly that he is willing to embarrass himself and make an effort to win you back is something else entirely.
And the truth is, women need security. I have never met a woman who didn’t need to feel loved and protected, especially to know that she is with someone who will not abandon her while she is pregnant.
Not that you need a man to have children. You can do it alone, and thank goodness for that. But if you have already decided to trust someone to be the father who will raise them with you, the last thing you need is for him, one day, just as you finally think you can lean your head back in your wicker chair and ask him to go bring you a mango and some coarse salt, to suddenly announce that sorry, this is all too much for him.
You don’t forget something like that, when someone kicks you precisely at the moment you trusted him most.
Every breakup leaves an enormous hole in a relationship.
Even if you get back together after that time apart, something in the trust, in your confidence that he won’t give up on you again, has been damaged in a way that is difficult to repair.
The only way to survive it is to remind yourself that he didn’t really give up on you.
Look, he texted you a few weeks after you broke up. He bribed you into taking him back with concert tickets. And most importantly, he realized that he had made a mistake when he let you go, that he needed to change for you.
The fact that he was the one who pursued you, that he was the one who brought you back, is something that will calm you every time that fear suddenly hits: Here it comes, he is about to pull the eject lever again and abandon you.
It is exactly like the Paris in “Casablanca,” a warm memory you return to whenever things get hard, one that restores your sense of security.
Because he fought for you when you walked away, and he will fight for you until the end.