She, thirty-one years old, describing herself as cheerful and sociable, accustomed to dating apps, regrets never having had an amorous relationship. She points out that she is solely responsible for this, as she is so afraid of giving herself to someone. He, thirty-four years old, retired to the countryside several years ago, "aspiring to a simpler life," is looking for a "fresh" woman with whom to grow old. They meet for the first time at their wedding, fly off to the Caribbean the next day, and then settle into a London flat that is supposed to be their love nest. A month later, they separate, terribly disappointed.
What happened? Well, nothing! No love at first sight, nor consummation of the marriage – quite the opposite of what the name of this reality TV show, Married at First Sight,¹ led us to hope for. However, according to the dating experts who had paired them up based on tests, it was an interesting match, combining similarities – they are both inexperienced, aspiring to eternal love, share the same tastes – and contrasts – she is extroverted while he is stable. In short, it should have worked, but it didn't!² There was general perplexity on the show.

While these dating experts are obviously not Lacanian, are psychoanalysts any more so? In 1968, Lacan expressed his doubts. During his Seminar, The Analytic Act, he noted that by judging male-female relations with a naturalistic reference, "we would end up saying things that would seem […] like madness."³ He also poked fun at psychoanalysts who allow themselves to be dominated by their clinical instinct" or even their "inner intuition": "The guy who comes to tell you that he was with a pretty girl in a mountain chalet, that there was no reason not to go there, but he just didn't feel like it, you say, 'Oh! There's something…' Why didn't it work out? First, you try to find out if this happens to him often, to have stops like that. In short, you launch into a whole speculation that implies that it had to work out."

A few years later, Lacan promoted the primacy of the One. Before the Oedipus complex, there is the One for every speaking being because the signifier all alone marks the body by chance, becomes the cause of a singular jouissance, impossible to negate, and fundamentally autoerotic. Here he is, the speaking being, cut off from all natural instincts, exiled from relation to the other sex. But that this relation is impossible and that his only partner is his jouissance ⁵ is something of which he may remain unaware for life. Indeed, following this contingent shock, the speaking being hastens to subscribe to the unconscious, cobbling together beliefs and ideals, and adorning himself with numerous semblances. In other words, in response to chance, he will construct a destiny that will never cease to be written. And when his jouissance makes him vibrate by unexpectedly resonating with that of another, that is, when the miracle of encounter falls upon him, there too he will resort to meaning and say, like all experts in encounters, that it was meant to happen, that it was written and predestined given the compatibility of their profiles, which are necessarily meaningful.
By situating the One, this cause of the absence of sexual relation, before the unconscious, Lacan has left us a resource for extricating psychoanalysis from the profusion of chit-chat that this "importunate relation"⁶ necessarily provokes. It is up to psychoanalysts, if they wish to be Lacanian, to make this the compass of their action in order to disrupt the defence that the speaking being has put in place and lead him back to the solitude of the One, about which he wanted to know nothing.
This is how psychoanalysis offers those who seek it an opportunity to talk about their love drama. It is a unique opportunity to detach oneself from one's destinal necessity in one's relationship with the opposite sex and to take responsibility for the incalculable, that is, one's jouissance beyond any law, which calls the shots and can suddenly make one fall for someone, or not.

^[1] Haywood, S. (executive producer), (2015–), Married at First Sight [TV series, series 9, 2024), CPL Productions.
^[2] Ibid.
^[3] Lacan J., Le Séminaire, livre XV, L'Acte psychanalytique, ed. J.-A. Miller, Paris, Seuil & Champ Freudien Éd., 2024, p. 267. [Unpublished in English.] ^[4] Ibid., p. 268.
^[5] Cf. Miller J.-A., "La théorie du partenaire," Quarto, N o 77, July 2002, p. 13-14. [Unpublished in English.] ^[6] Lacan J., "Note italienne," Autres écrits, Paris, Seuil, 2001, p. 311. [Unpublished in English.]