Last weekend I sat through 40 of the most depressing minutes I ever hope to witness on television.

Was it the evening news? It was not. Was it the first half of the rugby? No, it was not, nor the second half either.

It was a show that had me pinching myself to make sure it was really happening, that it wasn't some awful dream brought on by a combination of my tortured imagination and eating a toasted cheese sandwich too close to bedtime.

It was a show unsurpassed in my memory for plumbing the terrible shallows of which the human heart is capable. It was The Bachelor.

The topsy-turvy tombola of life

The Bachelor (M-Net; 7pm; Saturdays) is the latest so-called reality TV programme to adorn the airwaves, but unlike such flimflam and flummery as Survivor and Big Brother and Temptation Island, and similar teeth-gritting guff of the genre, the reality in this show is all too painfully evident.

The bachelor of the title is an American named Alex, who is allegedly quite a catch.

If you believe the show's producers, he is more than a catch - he is the whole sardine run. In a brief biographical sketch, we are told that Alex is handsome, that Alex is rich and that Alex used to swim a lot when he was at university. We are also told by Alex's optimistic mother that Alex is unmarried "because he just hasn't met the right girl yet". Aw, poor Alex.

But no! Lucky Alex! Because he's about to meet the right girl! Twenty-five women from around the United States have been mysteriously sourced by the producers of The Bachelor - presumably through classified advertisements and cards left in telephone booths - and they are going to spend the next few weeks competing for the honour of marrying Alex.

Does this sound perverse to you? Does it sound like an inversion of all that marriage is supposed to represent?

We all live in a yellow submarine

It shouldn't, because as the show unintentionally makes horrifyingly plain, this coldly cynical understanding of marriage as just one more prize to win in the topsy-turvy tombola of life may well be far closer to reality than all the spun-sugar platitudes in which we habitually traffic.

We were briefly introduced to the 25 contestants. Why, we wondered, are they doing it?

"Well," said Kim, "I'm at that stage of life when I am ready to settle down." Kim is 24 years old. Twenty-four! That's not a stage; that's barely the footlights.

My head reeled with questions. What has she been doing for the past 24 years that she feels she is ready to finally settle down? Leading squads of armed mercenaries into small Central American republics in the hope of sparking perpetual revolution? Just how little does she expect of life? Is she capable of subtracting 24 from the average life-expectancy of an American woman? Does she understand how long the rest of her life is probably going to be?

But these were irrelevant questions. The women on the show wanted to get married, the way they once wanted Malibu Barbie for Christmas, and that was that.

They all spoke the language of love. "I believe in true romance," said Eve. "I believe in love at first sight," said Carmen. "There's a soulmate out there for everyone," said Kelly. Not one of them showed any sign of being able to hear what they were saying.

Watching them speak was like being transported into a mirror-world in which people use all the words we use here, only all the meanings have been reversed.

Then I was struck by a depressing realisation: there was nothing unusual about these people. That is how people use language, and particularly the language of love: to prevent themselves from seeing themselves clearly.

A certain Jennifer inadvertently said it best. "I feel so excited!" she said. "I feel like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman." I had to agree. Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman was a role model for every woman trying to sell herself into marriage.

Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman was a prostitute who struck it lucky because her trick decided to keep her. A happy ending, for Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, was not having to sell yourself by the hour any more, because you had managed to sell yourself by the lifetime.

The Bachelor was appalling to watch. In the climax of the first episode, Alex speaks briefly to all 25 women, then evicts the 10 he finds least appealing. They stand facing him in a semi-circle of frozen grins, rigid as beauty queens.

It was appalling for the fact that these women allowed this to happen. It was even more appalling for the fact that they did not experience it as discontinuous from their everyday lives. I stared glumly at the screen and thought about marriage.

There are many good reasons to get married, and romantic love is probably the worst of them. When John Lennon voiced the opinion that all you need is love, he made less sense than at any other point of his musical career, including his rather questionable assertions that we all live in a yellow submarine, that he was the walrus and ob-la-di-ob-la-da.

I do not know that I believe in romantic marriage, but I still cling to the idea of it. Which is to say: sometimes I rather doubt the truth of romantic marriage, just as I rather doubt the existence of the Loch Ness monster and the lost continent of Atlantis and the G-spot, but life would be infinitely poorer and thinner if I ruled them out altogether.

Perhaps somewhere out there in the wild, dark world a marriage of romance is possible and waits, just as somewhere beneath the seas there may lie pillars and roads and ruins buried under silt and sand and the immense blue weight of the water.

I suppose it wouldn't hurt to take a look every now and then.