Then at the other end of the scale there are UK programmes like Couples Therapy and Your Mum, My Dad showcasing a more serious approach to the relationship-reality genre. And in Sweden, the national version of MAFS has turned out to be surprisingly nuanced and earnest. In all its forms, the genre makes for interesting viewing. “I am obsessed with MAFS,” psychotherapist and journalist Eleanor Morgan tells BBC Culture. “I cannot stop watching… I can’t tell you how many other therapists I know who are obsessed [as well]. And we’re all slightly embarrassed about how much we watch it.” Morgan believes programmes like MAFS can be helpful as well as problematic. “MAFS lays bare the fact that a relationship dynamic is something that’s co-created between two people,” she says. “It shows that blaming another person for how you feel or for a relationship conflict only gets you so far. Until you are able to be self-reflecting and hold yourself accountable, conflict is going to keep happening.”

Morgan is impressed with how both MAFS UK and MAFS Australia have held men responsible for their behaviour. She believes that men can – very broadly speaking – be quite blind to the effects of how they behave in relationships, but that the series have showed the effect of that behaviour. There are also things that are less helpful, in her view, like some of the language that is used – so-called “therapy speak”. Morgan mentions a participant in the latest series of MAFS Australia, who was called “emotionally abusive”, a “narcissist” and a “gaslighter”. “That doesn’t really tell us very much about what someone’s inner experience is like or how they actually feel,” she explains. “So as much as I am drawn to, and compulsively watch the shows, that aspect of it does frustrate me.”

‘Serious people‘

Couples Therapy, which shows established couples in a therapy room, is very different from MAFS, Morgan says. “That’s a very, very, very different thing… It’s still reality TV but it’s showing real, vulnerable clinical work with people. It’s not a formulated experiment.”

The many iterations of Love is Blind and MAFS across the world allow for various takes on the same concept. In Sweden, Married at First Sight, or Gift vid första ögonkastet (GVFÖ for short), is broadcast on public service television. It has the feel of relationship documentary, with normal, everyday contestants, serious psychologist sessions and earnest online discussion forums. The steadily growing viewership, mainly among young, urban viewers, gives rise to dozens of media think pieces every season.

“I think that to a big extent, people like GVFÖ because they feel that the programme is real,” viewer Casper Törnblom tells BBC Culture. He discusses the programme both with his colleagues at work, where a separate messaging channel is dedicated to the show, and on a popular Facebook thread that garners 700-1,000 comments every season. “The programme becomes a bit of a mirror or canvas for people to use to look at how relationships work,” he says. “I know that it is TV, which means that you can’t ignore the dramatic aspects, you have to make matches where there can be tension. But the experts and those who are behind it – when I have spoken to them [through work], I feel that they are actually motivated to succeed. They are serious people.”

Another GVFÖ fan is Jenny Eriksson from Malmö, an educator focussing on culture. “I’ve watched a little bit of Love is Blind, but it is a bit like The Bachelor, the men are so masculine and the women so feminine,”, she tells BBC Culture. “That is often very far from the world I live in.” Eriksson talks a lot with friends about personal relationships, and programmes like GVFÖ give her new angles to discuss. “I am very interested in attachment theory and other types of relational theories, and read up on those things. So it’s interesting to analyse the series both from the perspective of my own experiences and from the perspective of the conversation that is happening in society right now about how relationships work. And also to see how the participants are affected by that conversation.”

As an example, she mentions groom Alex from this year’s GVFÖ programme, who said he would start asking his new wife questions, something he had never done in previous relationships. “Maybe he meant more that he has been told that he doesn’t ask enough questions – I doubt that he has not asked anything,” she says. “That is something that is discussed a lot in various relationship forums.” It is also something she can relate to herself. “There are men who I have dated who think they are [being] interviewed for a job, and then they don’t remember they are supposed to ask questions, because they are so busy telling me how good they are themselves,” she says. “I once dated someone who, already in the queue to order our beers, went: ‘Well, I have studied this, and I am now working on this… my mum has coronary disease…’. I was like: ‘Uhm, yes, should we sit down?’”

Mattias Lindholm and Elis Larsson work at equality and anti-violence organisation MÄN, which was chosen by US indie band Bon Iver as their collaboration partner for a Swedish gig earlier this year. Over the past few years, MÄN has arranged two discussion evenings for people of all genders about GVFÖ, covering communication, gender norms and relationships.

“The first event was in 2021,” Lindholm says. “That particular season in Sweden caused a lot of debate about relationships and gender roles. We wanted to capture that.” Even though both discussion evenings covered themes from GVFÖ, with on-air expert Kalle Norwald coming along as well, that was just the starting point. “This year, we found that the men were generally better at the emotional work than in previous seasons,” Larsson says. “So one of the questions we had [to the expert] was: ‘How can you do that type of work, how do you practise it?’” adds Lindholm.

New conversations

But Swedish MAFS still battles some of the same issues as its reality programme siblings. “[GVFÖ] is a sadistic experiment,” said a prominent author and sociologist in a comment article in the country’s biggest daily paper earlier this year. “Marrying strangers to each other under the pretext that they have been scientifically matched by experts will never be done ethically.”

“The moral and ethical questions [around the programme] – there is a big discussion about them in Sweden right now, whether it is ethically correct that we do what we do,” says Kalle Norwald, psychotherapist, sexologist and the series’ expert who visited the discussion evenings at MÄN. “I would say yes.”

GVFÖ is about two things, he says: helping people find love, and public education on the topic of personal relationships. All the conflicts the experts see in the programme are around themes that they also face in their everyday clinical work, and Norwald frequently hears that people use the programme to discuss issues with their partner.

“I remember one person coming up to me, saying that she and her partner had watched an episode where I was talking to two participants about sex. This woman and her partner were watching together and looked at each other and realised that they had never talked about sex, and they had been together for many decades. It turned out neither of them was happy. So then they started discussing it… [The programme prompts] new conversations that have not been had before.”

When GVFÖ participants get picked apart by the media and public, Norwald places part of the blame with the viewers. “Many people misuse the programme to hate the participants. They put their own uncertainties and fears on them,” he says. He prefers it when people use the participants’ experiences to reflect on themselves. Instead of saying “I often feel vulnerable”, for example, they can say “I recognise myself in this participant” – that way, they don’t have to expose themselves, as the participant has already done that for them.

Norwald also underlines that the Swedish producers work hard to ensure all participants feel fairly represented on screen. They get to see their scenes when the programme is cut, and give feedback. “It has happened that [participants] have had comments,” he says, “and then we have edited a bit”. The narrative also needs to be understandable for a viewer who was not there. “It’s like an ethical stance we have, to bring out the couples’ stories so that it will be logical, because I think the participants get more hate when you don’t understand them,” Norwald explains. “But without compromising privacy. It happens every season that someone doesn’t want to talk about certain things and then we don’t push them.” In a previous series, one participant had a difficult story that he shared with his partner, but not with the viewers. “And then people got really annoyed that they didn’t get to know about his trauma,” Norwald says. “But that’s an ethical stance. He doesn’t want to talk about it on TV, so he shouldn’t.”

While the production team are included in the matching meetings for upcoming seasons, the three experts have the final say, Norwald explains. And they don’t match for drama – they match for potential. Over the past few seasons, most participants have defended the programme.

So should we stop feeling guilty about our weekend TV watching? Kalle Norwald believes relationships are entertaining regardless of whether you are in them or watching them, and that there isn’t necessarily a conflict between entertainment and seriousness.

But over in London, psychologist Eleanor Morgan sees it differently. Looking into other people’s relationships is always fascinating, she says – just look at Couples Therapy – but to get the big, primetime reality TV audiences, things have to feel dramatic. “These shows don’t work unless there is peril, drama and cliffhangers,” she tells BBC Culture. “There is a reason that so many people watch – myself included, sometimes against my better judgement.” She summarises her Friday working day so far. “After a morning of client work, I am now off to watch MAFS UK episode four.”

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