Kelly, the Amazing Relationship Counselor

I'm a big fan of The Amazing Race. It's one of the few reality shows I really get interested in. (That and the cooking shows -- when does Top Chef season 2 start??)

I'm fascinated by the Race because it showcases the world and because it brings home the fact that so many of my countrymen and -women fall into the Ugly American stereotype. Few are the contestants who really seem to appreciate the sights they're seeing and the cultures they get to experience. Too many are those who seem to view the world with a sense of superiority and condescension.

That, however, is not the aspect of the Race we'll be discussing today. Rather, our topic of conversation is this: Why is it that at least one team on every season is a couple who's using the Race to try to work out whether they really belong together? This season, it's Rob and Kimberly. Here's what the official Amazing Race site has to say about them:

"Rob & Kimberly met while bartending in Los Angeles, California. The young couple has been dating for two years and recently moved in together. Their primary reason for running the Race is to see if their relationship can withstand the intensity and pressure of traveling around the world at such a frantic pace."

The show is constantly showing clips of Rob and Kimberly saying things like, "We're at that point in our relationship when we need to decide whether to get married or go our separate ways."

What?? I'm sorry, but I don't think any healthy relationship ever reaches that point. You're happy together, or you're not. If you both want to get married, great! If not, that's okay too. If one does and the other doesn't, well, you have some issues to work out. But don't just say to yourselves that you've been together for X years, and that's the time when you're supposed to get married, so you'd better fish or cut bait.

These couples are letting society's expectations (or, rather, their perceptions of society's expectations) dictate for them the path of their relationship. It's not about whether they're happy with each other and their relationship -- it's about whether they're supposed to be happy. And whether they're supposed to be happier if they get married.

What an incredibly bad reason to get married.

Now, I don't pretend to be a relationship expert. (Well, sometimes I do.) I do have a marriage that I think everyone should envy, but every relationship is different and needs to be dealt with on its own terms. Perhaps it's conceivable that there are couples out there for whom this kind of thinking works -- maybe it really does make them happy to do what they think society wants them to do. (It's also possible, just maybe, that we don't see the whole story with these couples, but rather just the snippets of interviews CBS thinks will make for good TV. So it isn't really fair to judge them, is it? But I do anyway.)

Get married if you want to. Don't if you don't want to. If you're not sure, work it out. Talk about it. But don't take your relationship on national television and air your differences and fears and grievances there. If you feel like your relationship needs to pass some sort of test to prove it works, maybe you've already failed the test.