Another season of Married at First Sight Australia, another set of moral quandaries to unpack.
Last year, I stood here in front of you all and delivered my final vows for a hellish season of Married at First Australia. My eyes were bloodshot from hours of feral dinner parties, voice raw from screaming at Ryan’s scary collection of katana swords and skull goblets. “Married at First Sight, you have emotionally manipulated me, breadcrumbed me, and lovebombed me,” I sobbed. “This is where we go our separate ways. It’s not me: it’s you.”
Guess what? Send a complaint pigeon straight to the Press Council because that was a bald-faced lie. A year later, call me Foxy Jojo arriving at her wedding because I am back on the horse in a huge way. Matters were not helped by the first episodes arriving right in time for a recent hen’s getaway, resulting in a gaggle of girlies piling onto a king bed, cackling while passing around a bowl of assorted candy in a scene so cliche it could have been a stock image.
Married at First Sight Australia hinges on this kind of communal viewing experience. It’s for the frenzied group chats, the memes, the viewing parties. It’s frequently horrifying – I’ll get to that soon – but it’s also frequently deeply funny, putting regular people in the spotlight with all their weird flubs and flaws. For example, after being chastised by mum for spiking his hair up too much before his wedding, bamboozled boat mechanic Steven offered this powerful defence:
“The guy at the bus stop said I look dashing with it up.”
“What guy?”
“Just some guy.”
Or there’s the stock-standard pairing of “brunette Barbie” Mel looking to find “the blue to my pink” in gormless farmer Luke, who forgot the rings and chewed his gum through the vows. The pair have so little in common that their liveliest conversation came when comparing their preferred over-the-counter indigestion treatment. “I’ve never talked about Mylanta and Gaviscon on a date, let alone what I thought I’d be talking about on my honeymoon,” said Mel.
With participants too choked up on Gaviscon and hair gel, the show often leans on the supporting cast of family and friends to bring the drama in the first week. When Gia’s bumbling Uncle John revealed to the mum of groom Scott that she has a child, she furiously confronted him outside. “It just came out,” Uncle John said through tears. “Scotty doesn’t know.” Cue the hen’s party erupting in a word perfect rendition of the hit song from 2004’s Eurotrip.
That said, for a show that makes so many women laugh across Australasia, it is genuinely bizarre how obsessed MAFS is with making a mockery of women who dare to laugh a little too much on the show. On separate occasions, the editors went to town on both Rachel and Rebecca’s distinct laughs, making them echo absurdly across cities and seas, birds flying from trees. All the while, Danny geezers it up big time with his cheeky chuckle, montage and reverb free.
I realise at this point I am talking about the show like a bad boyfriend. Yes he negs my laugh, but he’s so funny! And all my friends like him! You just have to get to know him, give it a few weeks! Make no mistake: there is plenty of toxic shit happening already, and that’s before we even get to the fact that one couple have already been cut out of the show entirely after abuse allegations surfaced on social media (that’s a good one for the MAFS bingo card, by the way).
What has shocked me most is how the Ozempic era seems to have emboldened an unprecedented kind of fatphobia on the show, best embodied by “I have not really interacted with women” Chris. “Fat people are a no-go,” he said, later adding “my turn-offs are: fake tan, needy and fat people.” While there’s been skin-crawling mentions of men preferring “petite” in previous seasons, there’s a startling and harmful new level of frankness to his admission.
More concerning still is that the experts, who are supposed to be the moral compasses of the show, leave these comments from Chris’ audition tape totally unacknowledged. Instead, they focus on finding the ideal woman to fix him. “Because Chris is such a headstrong, abrasive and sceptical guy, whoever we match him with will have to challenge him, hold him to account, and not be afraid to call him out,” said Alessandra, before revealing he has been matched with a willowy model.
Although the show purports to be about matters of the heart, MAFS has always been fixated on body image and physical appearance. Scott goes to the gym at 4am. Bec talks about “working on herself” (losing 20 kilos), Rachel talks about not fitting the “physical checklist” (isn’t a size six) and David makes his priorities clear when he outlines what he is looking for in a partner (“gotta be fit, nice booty… and I hope she is a calm and kind person”).
No matter how many sets of veneers (at least three) and “beautiful fake tits” (at least two) there are, MAFS also remains a reminder that the world is full of all kinds of weird, lonely, infuriating people who may or may not be battling digestive distress. Upon realising their honeymoon suite had a toilet with no door, Steven, in the midst of a bout of diarrhoea, was left ashen-faced. “It’s not so much the view, it’s the sounds,” he said. “We’re all human and we make sounds.”
Couldn’t have put it better myself.
