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E: What do you get when you combine two charming redheads, one mid-century modern office, 10 blissfully partnered couples, and the bleak reality of millennial financial stability? Netflix’s new(ish) reality show, “Marriage or Mortgage.”

“Marriage or Mortgage” follows Nashville-based wedding planner Sarah Miller and realtor Nichole Holmes (the aforementioned redheaded duo), as they compete for the business of 10 Tennessee couples and convince them to either have their dream wedding (marriage!) or buy their dream house (mortgage!). It’s a show in the grand tradition of “Love It Or List It,” except add weddings. It’s basically a bonanza of late-stage capitalist consumption wrapped up in a placid, highly-watchable package. Claire, what were your first impressions?

C: The very idea of a show called “Marriage or Mortgage” made me feel ill, to be honest! Not quite as grim as the idea of a reality game show in which contestants compete to have their student loans paid off — !!! — but at least “Paid Off” was rather explicitly a satire of the country’s student debt problem. The show’s title frames the choice as “lifelong partnership versus financial investment in property,” which are two things that I find myself quite uncomfortable with placing in opposition. 

That being said, the show was clearly premised on an all-too-familiar dilemma faced by young couples who have had wedding industrial complex marketing fed to them for their whole lives, and who also want to literally have a roof over their heads. Weddings and houses are both very expensive and often unattainable for those millennials who don’t have access to lucrative jobs or parental support. Even for those who have the latter, a monetary gift might be earmarked “for a down payment or a wedding.” Plenty of couples find themselves choosing which to use their nest eggs on. It’s so real! So relatable! And are we really entitled to either a house or a huge wedding, let alone both? This is the picture of middle-class success that has been sold to American consumers for decades, but that doesn’t mean it’s sustainable for everyone to have an enormous McMansion with new granite countertops as well as a 300-person formal wedding. 

In short, I entered the show feeling queasy and unsure how I felt about the whole premise. How did the first episode hit you, Emma?

Highlights And Lowlights

E: So, the first episode that I watched is not actually the first episode of the show as it is presented on Netflix, because I got the screeners early and the order was switched up before the season was released. But if I’m being honest, I was dismayed to find out how easily I bought into the central concept of the show, which as you said before, also made me feel a bit (or a lot) queasy. (In America it feels like everything can — and will be — gamified, and the financial precarity of an entire generation is no exception.)

But “Marriage or Mortgage” does a good job of making it all seem so eminently reasonable. Of course this diverse cornucopia of couples have limited financial resources. Of course they want to invest in a home. Of course they want to throw themselves a fun, beautiful wedding to celebrate their family and friends, and their commitment to each other. And the budgets are… dare I say… reasonable? Coming from the New York City real estate and wedding markets, seeing these couples present budgets of 20-35,000 dollars to Sarah and Nichole, and getting 3-bedroom homes and elegant rustic chic wedding venues, I depressingly found myself saying “Wow! What a deal!” I have not experienced the marriage part of the equation myself, but I do have a mortgage for a very tiny Brooklyn apartment, and let’s just say I had to put down more than 25,000 dollars.

Honestly, the most aspirational part of the show is the discounts each couple is offered by both Sarah and Nichole on decision day. And that’s where the real competition seems to lie. Would you choose 50 percent off of your wedding gown, and a full-service subsidized flower crown truck? Or a budget for new SMEG appliances for your recently-built townhome? (The only reasonable answer here is SMEG. Always the SMEG.) Watching 10 episodes of “Marriage or Mortgage,” it became easy to ignore the fundamental reality that compels couples to go on such a show: We are fed dreams of consumption and success that are often incompatible with living in a nation with privatized health care and exploitative labor practices. Did you find yourself swept up in the “Marriage or Mortgage” magic?

C: I mean, to an extent. I have a toddler and my husband and I work from home in a small walk-up apartment — of course I’m seduced by the idea of getting not only a 4-bedroom, 2.5-bathroom house with a backyard, but also a $12,000 SMEG allowance as a sweetener. (And wedding porn is my Kryptonite.)

But yes, as I watched episode after episode, this was really my takeaway: “Marriage or Mortgage” is basically a coupon-clipping contest. Most of these couples plan to both get married and buy a house (eventually?), and they’re seeing which salesperson will knock the most off of the sticker price. That doesn’t mean other, more emotional factors don’t come into play. If a couple really, really wants a big gorgeous wedding ASAP, they might end up going with a wedding even if it doesn’t make financial sense compared to the outstanding deal Nichole got them on a house. But the way each episode builds up to their competing discount package presentation suggests that this — not “is a wedding or a house more important to our future?” — is intended to be the crux of the matter.

But this leads me to the part that began to leave a worse taste in my mouth than the premise itself: The sales tactics.

Look, sales is a profession in which people try to convince other people to buy stuff. Stuff they may not need, or even want! That’s the job. Sarah and Nichole pull out all the stops to find every item on the couple’s wish list (personalized wedding favors, a master bedroom with two closets) within the price range, and to leverage their network and reality TV exposure to get sweet sweet deals. But they also sniff around for emotional soft spots that they can exploit with meaningless gimmicks. 

One woman misses her late father, an exceptional cook, so Nichole gets a recipe of his framed and places it in the kitchen of one of the houses she’s showing them, predictably drawing a tearful outpouring from the client. Does this demonstrate anything about the house? Of course not! You could put a framed recipe in literally any kitchen, including where she lives right now! Both Sarah and Nichole are wont to invoke the authority of dead loved ones, who certainly would have wanted them to have a wedding/a house. In interstitial scenes, the two saleswomen share the tactics they’ve devised to tug at their clients’ heartstrings, cackling as they argue over whether a custom cigar bar to honor a dead parent will induce the couple to pick a wedding. It is, frankly, off-putting, and I’m not sure the show realizes that. But I have to hand it to them: even if unintentionally, it is an effective demonstration of how advertising pokes at our emotional wounds in order to convince us they can be healed with products.

Were there any lowlights or highlights for you?

E: I am so glad you brought up the weird emotional manipulation that this show traffics in. It was incredibly icky to watch two women gleefully plan ways to make their clients cry because of a deceased parent or grandparent, and thus form an emotional bond to either a home or a wedding. I believe a sentence along the lines of: “Isn’t this what your granddad would have wanted you to have?” was uttered more than once. It felt like the show was going for the type of heartstring-tugs that “Queer Eye” has managed so deftly; a mix of emotional exploitation and beautiful decor that drapes itself over viewers like a warm blanket. But “Marriage or Mortgage” was so transparent in its sales tactics that it told on itself. And that felt… icky.

As for the highlights, I took a particular liking to the couple who chose to buy a house for themselves and their daughter, and then just went and eloped. I’m not sure I could resist the allure of a wedding full of useless special touches that were tailored just to me, but my practical side was always always rooting for Team House. Again… THE SMEG ALLOWANCE! I consider it a crime that a couple actually chose a ranch fountain over a SMEG fridge. 

E: Every episode sprung forward a little bit to show us how the couple’s wedding or home turned out. And then… COVID happened. What did you make of the way that the show handled the fact that the pandemic clearly happened as they were wrapping filming?

The COVID Problem

C: Oh God. The transition cards that popped up with “Because of Covid-19…” were so gutting. Several couples chose a wedding because they really wanted to celebrate with their whole families and communities, giving up a dream house in the process, only to scale their big parties down to small, socially distanced gatherings. They’re game in the footage we’re shown, insisting that they got the wedding they wanted and couldn’t be happier, but it really punctured the fantasy. Really, you don’t sorta wish you had a 3-bedroom and a yard to ride this thing out in, rather than a wedding most of your friends couldn’t even attend? After all that, they didn’t even really get what they gave up their nest eggs to pay for. The Covid twist made the couples who chose a wedding look foolish, despite being no more foolish than the rest of us wedding-having idiots. 

Any final takeaways or chilling details? For me, it’s all the couples doing their direct-to-camera interviews on a couch in front of a gallery wall of EMPTY PICTURE FRAMES. It’s literally all about the packaging.

E: Existing in 2021 just means being sold things until we die. But when it’s done surrounded by flower crowns and rustic white paneling, it goes down a lot easier.  

How Depressed Does This Make Us Feel About The Capitalist Hellscape We Live In

4 out of 5 SMEG refrigerators

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Call to action…

We’ve been sickened thinking about the mass shootings that have occurred in less than a week in this country. Donate to the Colorado Healing Fund to help victims of the grocery store shooting in Boulder.

Also, call your elected officials and demand an assault weapons ban.

We’ve been reading…

Our former colleague Melissa Jeltsen on the rush to ascribe a single motive to mass shootings.

All the sharp reviews of the new Philip Roth biography by Blake Bailey— especially Laura Marsh’s withering one at The New Republic.

We’ve been watching…

“Shiva Baby,” a wry Jewish indie film about a woman who runs into her Sugar Daddy at a shiva.

We’ve been listening to…

“5-4,” a darkly hilarious and edifying podcast about the Supreme Court and its terrifying rightward drift over the past few decades.

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