'Til death, or cancellation, do us part

When news broke that Carmen Electra and Dave Navarro were parting, a nation was stunned.  After all, if a one-time Prince groupie who married Dennis Rodman on a whim, and a former Jane’s Addiction guitarist taking his third ride on the marriage-go-round can’t make it work, what hope is there for the rest of us?

All right, so maybe it wasn’t the most shocking separation of our time.  After all, newlyweds with a much cleaner track record, Nick and Jessica, already set the MTV marriage success rate at 0 for 1.  At least we could have imagined Nick and Jessica lasting.  They sang songs about each other, went camping, ate pancakes.  Carmen and Dave engaged in less traditional activities.  For one thing, they took the “’til death do us part” of their show’s name literally. The pair posed as corpses for their bachelor and bachelorette party invitations.  One of their series’ first episodes featured a midget stripper, which — while enjoyable — isn’t up there with a peaceful white dove as a great omen for lasting matrimony.

Of course, whether you’re two bubble-gum pop singers on the rise, or a rock star and a former “Baywatch” bombshell turned strip-aerobics queen, there is an easily extracted moral here: Don’t film your marriage.  At the very least, don’t film your marriage for mass consumption.  It’s almost as big a kiss of death as tattooing Roseanne’s name on your bicep or appearing in a J. Lo music video.

Putting your relationship on reality TV is humiliating.  Even if you do stay together, the whole country knows that you’re needy, he’s demanding, and that both of you are profoundly unpleasant to be around.  If the pressure of living a real life “Truman Show” isn’t directly responsible for shattering your marriage, then it will surely provide some painful residue when you do divorce.  Imagine seeing the DVD box set of your marriage swimming in the discount bin next to Season 1 of “Joey,” or knowing that “J.A.G.” outlasted you, many seasons over.

As we sift through the ashes of Carmen and Dave’s marriage, it’s seems natural to blame the stress of life in front of the cameras. Think of the everyday frustrations! Sharing a bathroom with a new spouse is bad enough without extending your personal space to a camera crew of strangers.  Then there are vanity issues: Microphone packs make you look lumpy, and tend to capture the most unromantic noises.  You don’t have a moment of privacy.  In addition to being sized up and tried out by your new spouse, you have to endure the scrutiny of a larger viewing public.

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But perhaps there is a secondary, often overlooked explanation for the poor performance of reality marriage: People who let camera crews take up residence in their love nest are a self-selected bunch.  They are publicity junkies — unstable, needy, and perpetually starved for attention.   If you don’t mind a boom microphone hovering over your morning Cheerios, you are a special breed of human being and, I’d wager to say, one who is more prone to interpersonal strife than the average person.

When they invited MTV cameras into their personal lives, Carmen and Dave joined a great tradition of media junkies, people who cease to exist unless someone is watching.  The great pantheon of media junkies includes Tom Arnold, Paris Hilton, Janice Dickinson, that guy who played Peter Brady, his surly “America’s Next Top Model” consort and anyone else who has ever appeared on “The Surreal Life.”

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