All the heterosexual nonsense I was forced to endure from the FIRST episode of MARRIED AT FIRST SIGHT
Help
Hello you sick fucks, and welcome to Married at First Sight recaps! I’ll be your co-pilot this season, along with the beautiful Patrick Lenton.
We actually started doing recaps together in a very similar way to this show! A panel of experts completed a series of psychological and physical tests upon thousands of applicants, and Patrick and I were paired together to watch terrible reality television and write about it. And I don’t kiss and tell but you can just imagine what our first time was like.
Yes this is Patrick and his lovely girlfriend but they only do love and physical affection together, not the most important thing - blogging.
Even though we are both trash people who love trash television and trashing heterosexual culture, neither Patrick and I have watched a season of MAFs before. Unfortunately to be serious for a moment, I think when it started I couldn’t get into it because queer people still weren’t allowed to get married, and it felt like a direct spit in the face by society! Since then everything i’ve seen peripherally about it has been men and women yelling at each other over a dinner table, and I can do without that in my life.
BUT this season we’ve decided to stop judging MAFS from the outside, and start judging MAFS from the inside.
Before last night’s ep I was annoyed apprehensive dreading excited to get started. Then I realised the episode was two hours long, and I was less excited. A reality television show episode should not be as long as a FILM !!!! A longish film!!!! What the fuck!! I know it’s the premiere but the other episodes go for 1.5 hours!! The perfectly length for a film!! It’s also on FOUR NIGHTS A WEEK! Do we not have lives? Is that what you think, MAFS producers? That nobody has a life outside of watching this godforsaken show?? How DARE you - there are so many other tv shows I also need time to watch.
Anyway, we are in it now. I have watched the entire episode. There is no turning back. I have now become a MAFS viewer. It’s like being baptised as an adult, except you get dunked under the water by a sexologist. As always, we will be ranking the episodes based on what annoyed us most, to annoyed us least. Put on your muffs, it’s time to mafs (not sure this will catch on)
LEAST ANNOYING
Anthony and Selin
I haven’t watched the show before, so I have yet to discover if they do sneaky trickery, such as making me think a couple is really well-matched and will have a nice time, only for it all to fall apart in approximately 48 hours. For now, I will take it as face value and say that Anthony and Selin seem like a really good match and are quite cute together (for straight people)
They both have children, and Anthony talks about his daughter, who is on the spectrum, with such love and emotion that I started to feel myself warm to him - I can only imagine that it worked wonders on Selin.
They obviously are not for me, but they both seem basic in the exact same ways. They are both obsessed with wanting/being an ‘old school’ gentleman, which I think from what I can gather translates to ‘treats a woman with basic respect’. And they say things like ‘wanting a partner in crime’, which is one of the more heterosexual sayings that exists. They seem perfect for each other.
Aunties
I love aunty culture!! Not only being an aunty, but having aunties. They are usually younger than your parents, cooler, will take you around, you can tell them you are gay etc. This episode features some wonderful aunties, with both Selin and Anthony (yes I am referring back to my notes to remember the men’s names) having an aunty at the small covid-safe ceremony.
One aunty has a cast on her right arm, and one has a cast on her left arm, so we can only assume that before filming they engaged in a classic Aunty Arm Wrestle to assert dominance as the superior Aunt. The show must reveal who won!!! Also Haley Joel Osment was there.
Levi
Levi accompanied our second groom Brent to his wedding to Tamara, and was great value. He was handsome and bitchy, all the things I like in a man.
He and Tamara clashed when it came up that if Brent was someone who ‘just’ worked in retail, that she would not be interested in him. I sort of tried to give her the benefit of the doubt in understanding where she was coming from at first - if she is someone who wants a husband who is really ambitious and wants power and money, she probably shouldn’t date someone who is happily working in retail. For both of their sakes!
But then she started saying that if she was dating someone who worked in retail she would be embarrassed to introduce him to people, and she unfortunately lost all of my benefit of the doubt.
MOST ANNOYING
Experts
Look at these three. So much of this episode was the show trying to get me on board that MAFS is actually an amazing “social experiment” and these three experts had trawled the nation looking for people to pair with their perfect match and soul mate. Sorry but who are you fooling! Please don’t treat me like an idiot. I am an idiot, but do NOT treat me like one.
I’m sure this is not a new thought, but you are pairing people up to make good television, and to have people fight! You may perhaps throw one or two actual good matches in there to keep it valid, but we all know what you are doing, and that’s okay! We probably wouldn’t watch a show where some nice people matched up and had a lovely time and there was no conflict. But please, relationship experts, don’t sully your profession like this.
Brent and Tamara
I know Brent and Tamara are here to have conflict and fight. I know Tamara is the ‘bitch’ of the season, and she seems very happy to play that role. Brent is too short, and too sensitive, and has just lost all his businesses due to covid. They explained this by showing breaking news segments about covid, as if we were all Big Brother housemates in the finale when Sandra Sully would appear on screen and show them what had happened in the three months they had been cut off from society.
Tamara is bossy and rude, and everyone is going to hate her, but I really do think so far that Brent LOVES it and has a little stiffy every time she is mean to him. They are not annoying to me because she is a bad person, they are annoying to me because they have a disgusting energy. They are both trying to establish dominance, they bicker and fight constantly, but it’s also in a flirty way with sexual undertones and I find it GROSS. Sorry! Cancel me if you must.
Cake and Feet
This episode was far too long, and conservatively there was about 40 minutes of discussion about feet, and how to cut a cake. If you didn’t watch, we discovered before the wedding that Brent hates feet and has a phobia of disgusting feet, so we heard a lot about feet, and if Tamara’s feet would be okay.
Then later, Brent handed her the knife to cut their wedding cake the wrong way, and she couldn’t cut it and looked silly, and then she wanted him to apologise for it and he wouldn’t.
Again I am giving her the benefit of the doubt, but to me it seemed like she was taking it as concerning that he wouldn’t say a simple ‘oh sorry’ for doing something small, and he was taking it as a challenge because he thought saying sorry would establish a pattern where he would have to say sorry all the time for things that don’t really matter. Wait, am *I* the real relationship expert????? Get me on this show! Fourth expert!
Obviously this relationship is going to absolutely blow up, and I have the feeling that when it does it will reveal they both suck, but I guess we’ll see!
Also I can’t make it out but I like to imagine the tattoo in between his pecs is a warning for people not to download movies.
That’s the end!!! I did it! I waited until these wedding nights to lose my MAFS virginity, and it was only slightly painful. I imagine the next few weeks are going to be absolutely chaotic and awful and make me hate life and society and television and maybe even Patrick, so please stick by me on this journey.
You have to, you are married to me now.
I love love. I love being in love, and love Bec writing about love.