It shouldn't be a choice. In an ideal world, people would be able to have a wedding and buy a family home without having to decide between celebrating their love surrounded by loved ones or finding a stable and safe place to start building a life together as a family.
"Marriage or Mortgage" is here to remind us that the real world is not an ideal world and is, in fact, a dystopian hellscape in which there is never any right answer and, no matter what path you take, you'll end up with about zero dollars left in your bank account.
A wedding planner and a real estate agent form the unlikely business combo behind the show, vying for the couple's hard-earned savings.
Wedding planner Sarah Miller visits wedding venues with the couple, discusses details over cocktail and cake tastings, knowing exactly what to say to convince those people that they need to dump 30 grand on just one day otherwise they're doing themselves, their families and their love a complete disservice.
Real estate agent Nichole Holmes shows the couple homes they can afford to buy with their deposit, setting them all up so they can picture themselves living there in a de-facto union because they couldn't afford to get married even though they really wanted to.
(And don't get me started on the fact that this is all being filmed just before a big pandemic hits and weddings get cancelled or severely restricted anyway.)
The two women go all out to ensure the couples pick the option that gets them their commission - including engaging in some seriously manipulative emotional blackmail that feels really dodgy sometimes.
At one point, to convince a couple to buy a house, the real estate agent shows them a kitchen with framed recipes concocted by the woman's dead father, who used to be a chef. And the house includes a room fully decorated for the child they said they'd love to adopt one day - so if that's not pulling at the heartstrings to get them to open the purse strings, then I don't know what is.
But before you go hating on the realtor, let me tell you the wedding planner is no saint either. For the same woman with the dead father, there's a handkerchief with his name embroidered on it, which she can use to wipe off the tears on her big day.
The whole thing is ... it's just mental. I watched the first episode in disbelief that that was actually the premise for the show, stopping halfway to Google that I wasn't somehow misunderstanding it.
Sadly, I wasn't.
It sounds ridiculously dumb to even ask the question - marriage or mortgage? - but then it dawned on me that, actually, that is a question that millennial couples face because, let's face it, who can truly afford both of those things which, in an ideal timeframe, would happen not that far apart from each other? I mean, count yourself lucky if you can save enough for one of those, let alone both.
My anger, I realised, wasn't at the show's premise - but the painful accuracy of it all.
But I eventually calmed down, turned caps lock off, realised my anger was misguided and remembered that these young people shouldn't have to choose.
The couples are all adorably in love, gushing over how much they want to marry and/or buy a home with each other. It's all very sweet while also slightly apocalyptic as you watch them drown their savings in what you're pretty convinced is the wrong decision. In the end, I just wanted them to have both. I wanted them to have it all. I wanted them to have it now.
It's a dumb show because we live in a dumb world, in a failed system. "Marriage or Mortgage" highlights how hard it is to be a young adult today. Whatever decision each couple made, it meant depleting their savings account completely, and starting over, hoping no great disaster struck in their immediate future, so they could keep on dreaming that they would eventually be able to have the other option too.
While "marriage or mortgage" sounds like a dumb choice, the truly dumb thing is that we live in a society where that even has to be a choice, because people can't afford to celebrate their love and find a safe home to start a family in.
I don't want to enjoy the dystopian capitalist nightmare that is "Marriage or Mortgage". It fills me with millennial dread for all the decisions we have to make that shouldn't even be optional (do I go to the dentist or do I fix my car? Do I eat avocado on toast or do I put money aside for a house deposit? Decisions, decisions) - but it's all so disturbingly accurate that, much like the proverbial train crash, I can't look away.
"Marriage or Mortgage" is currently available to stream on Netflix.
