I like to think that most people see the value of a person working to better themselves, and better the world. But how do you respond to someone who thinks anyone's attempts at personal improvement are futile, and that we, as individuals, or within a group, have no ability to change the world. This is what I came face to face with, recently, when I found myself living for 6 days with a stranger in the name of reality TV.
She came to stay at our family home, and my wife moved into theirs for pretty much a week, and, on the whole we all got along pretty well. Yes, there were a few moments of tension during that time, mostly brought about because of the format of the show, and yes, there were parts of the resulting show in which the editors employed some creative license to accentuate that drama, but if there was one thing that I initially took exception to when I watched the final product, it was the way the show had portrayed us, at the end, as two families with irreconcilable differences.
You see, I had gone into this production thinking that one of the main messages I wanted to send was the idea that no matter how different two families could be that they could still find a middle ground; that with patient communication, and by carefully stitching together, bit by bit, those delicate seams where two people's perspectives became non-aligned, people could find agreement. However, despite working hard to insert this aspiration into a good percentage of my interviews, and modeling it with my on-camera interactions, the idea never overtly showed it’s face in the final edit, and in the last 5 minutes the exact opposite message was one of the loudest things the audience heard. Namely, the idea that our two families differences had been completely unreconciled. Sad face.
But then it dawned on me. The reason the show hadn’t been able to bridge that gap with our two ideologies was quite possibly because this was, in fact, the reality of the situation. That our beliefs were actually completely mutually exclusive. Yes, I had tried my hardest to understand where the other-wife was coming from, and also to help her understand my position, but really, when taking a broader look at it from a couple of steps back I had to admit that we hadn’t really achieved much of that at all. It seemed that if there was one thing that would put the brakes on my Peace, Love and Mung-beans idealism, it was going to be bare-faced mutual exclusivity. Now, as an explanation of what these positions were and why they existed (especially for anyone who didn’t see the show), it is best to recount the most heated on-camera conversation I had with the other-wife during the whole production. A conversation which never actually ended up in the final edit. Essentially, our whanau's big thing was promoting the power of individual action, especially in regards to finding solutions to environmental issues. However, the other-wife revealed that, for her, individual people had no effect at all on how things unfolded in the wider world, and that, in fact, individual’s actions will never have an effect whatsoever on any other person or object, full stop.
Yes, two positions pretty much at polar ends of the consequence spectrum. And it
seemed that no matter what I said, there was no way she would sway an inch from her camp. There was also no swaying from mine either, but that was mainly because the only argument she could offer was, literally, that it was God, and only God, that was responsible for things happening - not the best angle to try to convince a guy who has been staunchly atheist since pretty much forever.
Now, I am not going to get into the ins and outs of how logical the idea of God is or isn’t. That is definitely best left for another time. The purpose of this post is to help me come to terms with the notion that bringing about a change in some people’s minds will sometimes take a lot more than just a week of them hanging out together. Theoretically, yes, agreement could have been possible between that other-wife and I, but, as far as I can see, any harmonious ‘meeting in the middle’ would essentially have had to have come in the form of one of us suddenly being completely happy to flip our entire world view on its end forever. Quite a considerable number of steps more extreme than agreeing on whether the dishes should be left to drip-dry or not. Essentially, this post is to help me feel content with the idea that sometimes, if we have limited time, the best we can do to bridge a gap between two people is just to find as many things as possible that those two people already have in common, and then celebrate those things. And, yes, maybe I should have just focused my energies on communicating this over the last couple of days of shooting, instead of trying, fruitlessly, to bring about some kind of magic alignment of beliefs. There is a common preconception that reality TV shows are much more about dragging in viewership with drama and less about improving society, but there were definitely parts of that show that had its heart in the right place. It's okay to have a bit of drama, but I think that viewers would have appreciated exploring how people can constructively navigate their way through persistent differences of opinion, and the audience would have embraced any attempt by a show’s participants, and the production company, to create some kind of (even if it's only partial) happily-ever-after.
(And to watch the episode: https://www.tvnz.co.nz/shows/wife-swap-nz/episodes/s1-e2)
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