To say Netflix’s The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On show is a “self-described social experiment” (as the official tagline states) doesn’t nearly do its wackiness justice.
Imagine spending hours watching several couples around your own age air out their deepest traumas and greatest interpersonal gripes to millions of people who quickly develop random and intense opinions about those televised relationships. That’s the premise of a show now in its third iteration, having streamed its latest season at the end of August of this year. (Two seasons of the show follow heterosexual relationships, and a third – The Ultimatum: Queer Love – follows people in queer relationships.)
The Ultimatum is a dating reality show hosted by Nick Lachey (best known as Jessica Simpson’s ex-husband) and his wife Vanessa Lachey, a couple who purportedly married after Vanessa issued Nick her own ultimatum. Each season, the show follows five to six couples on the verge of either marriage or a breakup: two entirely opposite relationship statuses, to state the obvious.
Each couple has eight weeks to decide whether they want to marry one another, marry an individual from another couple in the show, or walk away single. In the process of making that decision, each couple spends three weeks living with their original partner and three weeks living with someone they choose from another couple in a “trial marriage.” This goes just about as well as you’d expect.
In an exercise of disclosure, I’ll note that I haven’t yet finished the show’s latest season. I love watching The Ultimatum despite (or because of) its utter depravity, and I parcel out each episode carefully on weeknights after particularly challenging days of school. No spoilers, please. Nonetheless, as a passionate fan of all Netflix dating shows – and as a law student – I feel entitled to assert my opinions despite lacking the requisite context, much as the show’s cast does with their own romantic choices.
The show depicts a flat, uncomplicated view of romantic commitment that you can’t believe any adult would buy into. Nonetheless, hosts Nick and Vanessa Lachey remind the cast frequently over ensemble candlelit dinners that their own relationship benefitted dramatically from a marital ultimatum being dropped. They encourage the cast couples to accordingly “buy in” to the televised experience, forgetting their original partners entirely to focus on their new chosen partners for the three weeks they live together. In doing so, they’re meant to learn about their own hang-ups in a new context and reflect upon what they need from a romantic relationship. The hosts reiterate that “you either leave the show engaged, or leave alone.”
Watching this season, you can’t help but hope that one of the contestants will take the latter option, which they seldom, if ever, do. The three weeks the cast spends with their ‘new partners’ is a gripping exercise in schadenfreude: they meet each other’s families and friends, scrap over who did the dishes last, and imagine out loud what these virtual strangers might be like as co-parents someday. Mostly, they exchange generic platitudes in their pyjamas over glasses of wine as if they’re deeply insightful. My favourite of these insights is that of the two newly-coupled entrepreneurs who sagely repeat to each other that “marriage is good for business” – without ever saying why or how they think so. It’s immediately clear that these people love the idea of marriage as a Band-Aid solution to relationship woes, regardless of whom it is they’re marrying.
The three weeks away from their original partners also doesn’t trigger any clear growth in the cast members – which makes sense, considering some couples have been together since high school and others have lived together for years. The avoidant travel nurse doesn’t learn to advocate for herself with her blustering sales-bro boyfriend. The bitter grad student doesn’t better control his temper during emotional discussions with his girlfriend of eight years. The self-styled girl boss still refuses to accept that her laidback boyfriend isn’t Forbes material. And yet, after their weeks living with people they barely know, the cast members are so relieved to be back with their familiar partners and habits that they throw away all of the changes to their initial relationships they said they wanted to make in the first place.
So much of this show is self-evident. It’s clear to any critical thinker that you probably won’t end up with someone you’ve known for three weeks while pining over your long-term partner, red flags be damned. It’s equally apparent that personalities and dynamics don’t typically change for the better with the added pressure of a life-changing ultimatum. You know that Netflix dating show cast members don’t typically live happily ever after in love, and that proposals don’t automatically save people from breaches of trust and communication.
Nonetheless, The Ultimatum offers something that reasoned reality mostly doesn’t: the chance to feel good about your own choices and behaviour compared to the fellow twenty-somethings that choose to air their dirty laundry out for countless viewers. I may have my own flaws and lapses in communication, but none of those look quite so bad when faced with an onscreen couple arguing for forty minutes about whether or not to hold hands.
I’m not sure that’s necessarily the takeaway the Lacheys want their viewers to have, but it’s one that continues to bring me back to the show regardless, season after season.