Description
The story begins predictably, man meets woman, they fall in love and marry. One shares their veteran status, and the other thanks them for their service. This is an increasingly common script in contemporary dating reality TV. Through a narrative analysis, we explore military member portrayals in Love is Blind (US and UK) and Married at First Sight Sweden to understand what it means for the military to ‘join the cast’. We argue that dating reality TV employs specific gendered grammars to render military institutions intelligible and relatable. Beyond a clear heteronormative script, we argue that these shows constitute important sites to understand contemporary and contextual militarism. Researchers have been attentive to media representations of militarized masculinities and there is an emergent debate on gendered dimensions of military reality TV produced by or in support from militaries on testing, deployment and war-fighting. Military ‘storylines’ in seemingly ‘apolitical’ reality TV, not least dating shows, remain underexplored. Through representations of individuals that served without focusing on active service, the shows render militarism “palatable” (Jester, 2023). Specific heteronormative scripts of love make military stories relatable for audiences, which are not reached through ‘typical’ military reality TV.
