“I think that to a big extent, people like GVFÖ because they feel that the programme is real,” viewer Casper Törnblom tells BBC Culture. He discusses the programme both with his colleagues at work, where a separate messaging channel is dedicated to the show, and on a popular Facebook thread that garners 700-1,000 comments every season. “The programme becomes a bit of a mirror or canvas for people to use to look at how relationships work,” he says. “I know that it is TV, which means that you can’t ignore the dramatic aspects, you have to make matches where there can be tension. But the experts and those who are behind it – when I have spoken to them [through work], I feel that they are actually motivated to succeed. They are serious people.”
Another GVFÖ fan is Jenny Eriksson from Malmö, an educator focussing on culture. “I’ve watched a little bit of Love is Blind, but it is a bit like The Bachelor, the men are so masculine and the women so feminine,”, she tells BBC Culture. “That is often very far from the world I live in.” Eriksson talks a lot with friends about personal relationships, and programmes like GVFÖ give her new angles to discuss. “I am very interested in attachment theory and other types of relational theories, and read up on those things. So it’s interesting to analyse the series both from the perspective of my own experiences and from the perspective of the conversation that is happening in society right now about how relationships work. And also to see how the participants are affected by that conversation.”
As an example, she mentions groom Alex from this year’s GVFÖ programme, who said he would start asking his new wife questions, something he had never done in previous relationships. “Maybe he meant more that he has been told that he doesn’t ask enough questions – I doubt that he has not asked anything,” she says. “That is something that is discussed a lot in various relationship forums.” It is also something she can relate to herself. “There are men who I have dated who think they are [being] interviewed for a job, and then they don’t remember they are supposed to ask questions, because they are so busy telling me how good they are themselves,” she says. “I once dated someone who, already in the queue to order our beers, went: ‘Well, I have studied this, and I am now working on this… my mum has coronary disease…’. I was like: ‘Uhm, yes, should we sit down?'”
Mattias Lindholm and Elis Larsson work at equality and anti-violence organisation MÄN, which was chosen by US indie band Bon Iver as their collaboration partner for a Swedish gig earlier this year. Over the past few years, MÄN has arranged two discussion evenings for people of all genders about GVFÖ, covering communication, gender norms and relationships.
“The first event was in 2021,” Lindholm says. “That particular season in Sweden caused a lot of debate about relationships and gender roles. We wanted to capture that.” Even though both discussion evenings covered themes from GVFÖ, with on-air expert Kalle Norwald coming along as well, that was just the starting point. “This year, we found that the men were generally better at the emotional work than in previous seasons,” Larsson says. “So one of the questions we had [to the expert] was: ‘How can you do that type of work, how do you practise it?'” adds Lindholm.
New conversations
But Swedish MAFS still battles some of the same issues as its reality programme siblings. “[GVFÖ] is a sadistic experiment,” said a prominent author and sociologist in a comment article in the country’s biggest daily paper earlier this year. “Marrying strangers to each other under the pretext that they have been scientifically matched by experts will never be done ethically.”
