Marry or Move On?
Marry or Move On?
A sociological reading of Netflix's "The Ultimatum"
I’m perpetually late to the pop culture party. I just finished Season 1 of Ted Lasso (it’s good, in case you haven’t heard), and I’ll get around to watching CODA eventually. My TV and movie consumption tends to be slow and sporadic. An 8-episode season usually lasts me two months, give or take. I’m reluctant to pick up new shows, given the time commitment: is it good enough to be my one show for the next eight weeks?! Further complicating matters – and much to my partner’s consternation – I feel compelled to complete the shows I’ve started, and I prefer to watch one show at a time.
This is more about my streaming habits than you ever wanted to know, but this background is necessary to underscore the gravity of my next statement: I interrupted Ted Lasso, Season 2 to begin a new series, based on the recommendation of one friend, while that new series was still underway. One week in I’m halfway through.
This unicorn show is called The Ultimatum, and it is quintessential trashy reality TV. Because I’m not the last person on Earth to hear about it, for once, I am delighted to summarize it for those of you not yet familiar.
The first thing to know is that it’s by the same team that brought us Love is Blind, the dating show that captured countless viewers’ attention in the earliest days of the pandemic. The second thing to know is that this show is bonkers.
Ultimatum features six heterosexual couples with a major problem. One partner (in some cases the man, in others the woman) has issued the titular demand: agree to marry me, or we’re through. To get the recalcitrant partner off the fence, the producers have devised a truly diabolical scheme.
In Episode 1, the six couples break up and start “dating” the other contestants. (I put dating in quotes because really everyone is just hanging out together at a hotel lounge; their dates are the equivalent of having a series of one-on-one chats at a cocktail party.) In Episode 2, they choose a new partner. In Episode 3, they move in with that new partner for a three-week “trial marriage” (lol). Afterward, they get back together with their old partners for a few weeks before deciding who, if anyone, they want to get engaged to in the season finale.
Bonkers, right? But I swear, I picked it up for the sociology! I’m giving a talk later this week about a work-in-progress paper (coauthored with Jaclyn Wong) on marital power. Among other results, we find that the (highly-educated, different-sex) couples in our sample strongly reject the idea that power is about dominating your partner or trying to get your own way. In other words: a “good” use of power in committed romantic relationships is the opposite of whatever the heck the Ultimatum cast is up to.
And that is—at least partly—why it makes for such good TV. No one is going to film two partners having an amicable discussion about how they can each get their needs met. The power (heh) of reality TV lies in the apparent distance between what the viewer can imagine doing in her own life and what she’s watching others do on her laptop screen. It’s where we go to see what would happen if we turned off all those pesky inhibitions that keep us polite, empathetic, and horribly boring.
But another way of understanding reality TV like Ultimatum is as caricature. Like amusement park artists, the producers take features of the truth and distort them. In this case, the feature in question is the outsized role marriage still plays in the American cultural imagination, even as our ideas about how to do it “right” keep changing.
Whereas those annoyingly sophisticated Europeans are increasingly rejecting marriage in favor of long-term cohabitation, marriage is not yet passé in the U.S. The proportion of never-married adults has grown, but they are still the minority. By age 55, only about 15% of women and 18% of men had never married. Education and marriage are now positively correlated: college-educated folks have higher rates of marriage than high school grads.
My colleague Zehra Yildirim is doing fascinating research on why Americans remain obsessed with marriage, despite a host of societal changes we’d expect to push them away. I won’t spoil her findings here, but stay tuned! In the meantime, Zehra introduced me to the theory of marriage as capstone.
As sociologist Andrew Cherlin explained in The Atlantic a few years back, marriage for my parents and grandparents was “a celebration of what a couple would do in the future” and “the first step into adulthood.” My mom was 22 when she married and had yet to move out of her parents’ home. By contrast, I will be 31 when I marry and haven’t lived at home for more than a few weeks in over a decade.
For people in my situation, Cherlin argues that marriage is more like a capstone than a foundation: it’s “the last brick put in place to finally complete the building of the family.” (Or, less poetically, the second-to-last brick. The vast majority of college-educated Americans have children after marriage.)
It was with some dim awareness of that sociological backdrop that I watched, horrified, twelve infants obsess over marriage. At 30, Nate and Lauren are by far the oldest of fogies among the Ultimatum cast.
Most of the cast is in their mid-20s. Among the six who issued the marriage ultimatum, the average age is 25.5 and the median, if you care about such things, is 24.5.My aghast reaction definitely reflects my own class and ideological positions. While I don’t have enough demographic info to say for sure, my guess (based on their occupations) is that some cast members went to college, and others did not. Several made engagement a prerequisite for moving in together, which hints at more conservative political or religious beliefs.
To be sure, there are plenty of communities in which marriage in one’s early 20s remains the norm (even as median age at first marriage has trended upward to a little over 30 for men and roughly 29 for women in 2021) and in which cohabitation is frowned upon. I understand how averages work. So why did the relative youth of the Ultimatum cast annoy me so much?
Though I would never have put it in these terms before reading Cherlin, I suppose I do subscribe to the marriage-as-capstone idea. I would have been reluctant to marry before I had a solid handle on who I was and what I wanted out of life—and at 24.5, or even 25.5, I definitely did not have that. So perhaps my reaction was partly a failure of imagination: if I didn’t have it together then, how could you?
But it was more than that. As I listened to the ultimatum-givers offer their rationale, it struck me that they, too, seemed to be thinking of marriage as a culmination of sorts. But rather than a capstone, they held it up as trophy: a very public status symbol that represented personal success rather than a celebration of the relationship they’d built. Perhaps, from my vantage point, they were trying to shortcut the blood, sweat, and tears one must shed before “earning” marriage.
No spoilers here, but suffice to say that if you are willing to actively consider marrying someone you met a month ago, because they seem like a better match than the partner you’ve dated for years—well, it’s hard not to conclude that marriage itself, rather than a particular relationship, is the goal. One character, Rae, is certain (at least at the start of this whole thing) she wants to marry her original partner Zay. But when he and the producers independently ask her to explain why, she comes up empty. What she wants, it seems, is to be married; Zay is somewhat incidental.
The wisest among us know that it’s impossible to fully understand a relationship from the outside, and that we’re better off not trying. My conscious brain rejects the notion that marriage is something one earns at all, let alone through my personal formula. The Ultimatum cast might, very reasonably, criticize me for putting off marriage and children until my career is relatively established.
But in my defense, judgment is the energy this genre of reality TV feeds on. And when we interrogate that judgment, we learn interesting things about who we are, what we value, and where we fit in the social tapestry. Americans overwhelmingly agree that marriage is important. Why it matters and where it fits in a life are, as the Ultimatum so luridly shows, questions with increasingly polarized answers.
As one friend aptly put it, the show is “a dumpster fire you can’t look away from.”
Not-so-incidentally, Lauren is described as 26 in the show’s captions, but internet sleuths have determined this was either a lie or a mistake.