So another new dating program has started this week. That’s number four. On Monday we had Date tasty, First dates and Long live loveTuesday came Out together, home together? on top of. How shall I describe the program? Like a mix of I’m going on a trip and I’m taking it with mea touch Farmer seeks wife and it certainly has something of it B&B full of love, which everyone has been watching all summer. Sunday was the apotheosis of that. Of the eight singles, four had found a match, but at the reunion – weeks after the last recordings – two romances remained. Joy and Dani and Debby and Paul. The last couple in particular made viewers week. Woman of 62 and man of 69 so in love as calves. So it is possible (still).
It may be a coincidence, but the first three (out of five) bachelors we were presented with in Together out, together at home? are also not squeaky. Ex-pilot Eric is 63, former marine Bart 61 and ICT specialist Mehrnaz is 56. All candidates naturally ‘crave’ for love. First they were allowed to speed date a number of romantically interested people, choose three and then, all at the same time, go on a “dream trip”.
Does this program have the potential to become a hit like B&B full of love? Doubt, doubt. Point 1, it’s not summer and point 2, maybe it’s still a little too early (after B&B) for viewers to get attached to all those new faces. But, there were definitely interpersonal gems in the first episode. Is it useful to start a speed date at someone’s home right away about the furnishings? “I see a neat house, clinical, nothing on the wall, little color, that I think ooo, this needs cushions.” The five minutes with this candidate were already too long for Bart. In any case, I expect to enjoy Bart with his low tolerance limit and his three dates in England. Mehrnaz will not have it easy with her three men in Iceland either. Watch out for blue-eyed Rob, I’d like to tell her. He fell madly in love after meeting her for the first time. Only ex-pilot Eric doesn’t seem to have a problem. He can’t believe his luck with his three-headed harem. It seems to me that there is a risk that the three women get along so well that they no longer need him.
Good deed or selfish?
Kelly van Binsbergen’s mother had to wait seventeen years for her. In 1993, at a Chinese airport, she held Kelly in her arms and was finally a mother. In the four part series The Chinese takeout Kelly van Binsbergen asks questions she hasn’t wanted to ask for thirty years. About her own adoption, but also about the phenomenon. Is adoption a good deed or selfish? Do you save a child or uproot it? And how do you raise a child who doesn’t look like you?
In the 1970s, 4,000 adopted Korean children came to live in Dutch families. The conversations Van Binsbergen has with three of them, now in their fifties, are of a rare openness – and that must be due to mutual understanding. “I was the showpiece,” says one of them. She was adopted from Korea as a malnourished baby. “Everyone could see from me how well my mother could mother.”
Nice, the conversations, in Zeeland dialect, with her father. Did he know what he was getting into at the time? He and her mother had taken a course, the main thing that stuck in his mind was that he had to dress properly for the trip to China. But further? Few. That was true for many parents. That adopted children might have difficulty bonding, be angry and rebellious or be bullied at school, who counted on that? Sad, how Van Binsbergen has always been ashamed of her Chinese features and “inside” did not become Dutch.