Sex & Relationships

Married strangers — reality’s worse than reality-TV

Would you marry a stranger? It’s surprising how many people do without realizing it.

I’m not talking about “Married at First Sight,” the FYI channel’s reality show about arranged marriages.

Those couples know they don’t know each other, though four “experts” have supposedly matched them up based on “science.” No, the surprise comes from a look at couples well on the way to the altar.

In the real world, when the only experts selecting your mate are your own head and heart, are you still only making decisions based on the “good on paper” qualities? Are we looking any deeper than a TV matchmaker would?

I just went through Pre-Cana with my fiancé; it’s a course required for couples who want to marry in the Catholic Church. But it turns out the church isn’t worried so much about making us good Catholics as about making Catholic marriages last.

We were expecting to barely make it through a full day of rigorous religious training, the likes of which we haven’t had since grade school. Instead, a theatrical, long-married couple from Staten Island taught a (mostly) secular lesson on the basics of a lasting relationship.

Along with several dozen other couples, we got questions — in categories such as finances, communication skills, problem-solving, sexuality — that we each had to answer on our own, before comparing answers.

The point was to force conversations that couples may avoid or scant, whether out of silly bliss, sheer ignorance or to avoid confrontation. Call it a high-stakes version of The Newlywed Game — The Not-Yet-Wed Game.

It went pretty smoothly for my guy and me. Our two sets of answers affirmed that we were on the same page. Not so for some of the couples surrounding us.

All across that dreary high-school cafeteria (a place where confidence goes to die), the body language — heads in hands, wide-eyed faces with tense mouths — suggested that many of these couples were confronting these subjects for the first time.

(Or maybe, in some cases, suffering through the 216th time.)

These couples had enough confidence in their relationships not only to get engaged, but to pursue getting married in the church in front of God and Grandma.

If they haven’t had some of the big conversations, do they really have much more hope than the folks on “Married at First Sight”?

Sure, you can judge whether to date someone based on his ability to hold a job, whether he has friends or hobbies, how he keeps his home, etc. But if you ever want to move beyond dating, the two of you have some huge issues to address.

Do you want to have kids? How many? Where would you raise them and in what religion, if any? What happens if one of us or one of our parents gets sick? How much money is reasonable to spend from a joint account without first telling your spouse?

“Married at First Sight” is obviously a gimmick, with marriages as genuine as professional wrestling. But in real life, plenty of normal, well-meaning people enter into marriage without having done much more to prepare to face the challenges ahead.

So, for anyone not doing Pre-Cana, it can’t hurt to see a counselor before tying the knot or even right after, to force you to talk about the uncomfortable parts of life.

Having conversations you don’t want to have can prevent you from succumbing to the ominous divorce statistics that hover over your carefully curated ceremony. (We got a reminder of that at the start of our course, a gloomy, “Look around you. Half of these couples will not make it.”)

If you’re not putting in more advance work for your marriage than the “personalities” on a tacky reality-TV show, it’ll be hard to stick together in even the smaller storms.