Marriage or Mortgage Keeps Up with the Times

Depending on where you are in life can determine how well you understand the dilemma facing people so much in love they want to marry.  The traditional progression has not completely disappeared.  Two people meet, get married, rent until they can afford their first home and continue to build a life together from there.

Netflix’s Marriage or Mortgage shows there’re other ways to climb that pole.  The reality TV show proves that dreams and fantasies about an ideal wedding are powerful motivators that can often overwhelm the pull of the pragmatic and the practical.

Set in Nashville, a wedding planner and a real estate agent compete to convince couples on the threshold of marriage to choose either a custom-tailored wedding or to buy a house.  Lean and stylish, both Nichole Holmes, the real estate agent and Sarah Miller, the wedding planner are A class closers who listen intently and use what they hear to make the dream of a perfect wedding or the ideal home of their own.

It’s the process and the people that make this show so addictive and irresistible. You find out too that Nashville is much more than the Grand Ole Opry.  Each of the couples find themselves in the same quandary.  They all have very close to the same amount money to pay for a wedding or invest in a house.  Typically, around $25,000 and $30,000.  Most are also looking for homes that fit within the average selling price across the country, $300,000. These couples may be genuinely torn between a wedding or a house but they all know exactly what they want from each.  Uncovering these details discloses values and reveals the nature of the bond that brought and keep these couples together. This is where Marriage or Mortgage shines. 

The Chicago Tribune’s Nina Metz correctly declared social commentary is the subtext of this engrossing program.  The types of couples the show engages are broad and it does a beautiful job of revealing the emotional drivers shaping peoples’ dreams and wishes. It would have been easy to take the cookie cutter approach and select couples who fit more conventional norms regarding age, race and sexual preference.  But then it wouldn’t be nearly as appealing. 

Straight couples, gay couples, white couples, black couples, mixed couples; just about everybody’s here.  As Miller and Holmes learn what motivates their potential clients and propels their desires, the viewer not only listens to, but watches how discussing an “always dreamed of wedding” or a “forever” home bores to the core of people’s souls.  It’s the job of the show’s hosts to let them visualize both possibilities.     Miller escorts each couple around town to check out wedding venues, solidify wedding themes and nail down attire while Holmes lines up three homes for the couples to view with the goal of having them select one as their entrée to home ownership. 

It wasn’t until the fourth episode that we see the series veering toward the unconventionally inclusive. Middle aged, gay and rocking the same hairstyle, one woman had officiated at the other woman’s previous marriage and now they were two months into their own engagement.   If they chose wedding, they would be celebrating community as well as commemorating their love for one another.  

Being attentive listeners made making the final decision difficult and brought out an unseemly side of the show.  Information gleaned from talking with the couple could be used to capitalize on a person’s sentimentality, longings or grief.  You’d expect homes to be staged to highlight how well they may be suited to a specific couple’s needs.  But sometimes the customization came much too close to mercenary pandering as seen in Episode 2, Adopting New Traditions.  The woman’s father had been an orphan and never adopted.  One of her dreams was to give a home to an orphaned child.  Was it going over a line to stage a room as child’s bedroom that would fulfill that wish?   

As Raven, the future bride in Waiting for Marriage (Ep. 7), commented, “you play dirty”.   She used the phrase when talking with both Miller and Holmes.  A regular component of the show is to quote costs and later come back and significantly discount the original quotes.  Venues would cut their costs; bridal shops would throw in the cost of the veil or enhance the quality of materials at no additional cost.  Selling homeowners would refinish walls at no charge to the buyers.  Another might ask less than the listed price for the home.  The amount of “too good to be true” in the show is often astounding and unquestionably its biggest drawback.

Watching people consciously and willfully try to make each other happy never gets tiring, though.  Final decisions of whether the couples chose that over the top wedding or the keys to their first home invariably reflected the age-old desire to please the one you love.  Marriage or Mortgage reminds us of how universal desire is. 

Marriage or Mortgage

Netflix