The American and British versions of Married At First Sight always looked awful, so I ignored them. But when we started watching Australian Gogglebox and saw how insane those people went every year when MAFS came around, I figured there might be something interesting going on.
And there is. MAFS Australia may be the most finely-tuned engine of interpersonal dysfunction ever created. Unlike the other versions of the show, the producers Down Under make only an occasional effort to create successful love-matches… at least half the time, they’re intentionally putting people together to create explosive, toxic interactions. And they are really fucking good at it.
I mean, there’s no scenario where anyone thought Bryce and Melissa were a good fit, except in the sense that he’s an instinctive predator, and she’s a practiced victim. There was only one way things could have played out with them… he was negging her within 72 hours, brazenly manipulating her abandonment issues shortly thereafter, and when his personality couldn’t withstand contact with reality, gaslighting the hell out of her. And Melissa, in turn, did exactly what she was expected to do… fall for it with the desperate, pathetic passion of a love-lorn spinster.
The gross/fascinating thing about Bryce is that he’s so confidently stupid about his nature… there is something disturbingly Trumpian in the way he leverages the tools of abuse in a way that’s purposeful but also instinctive. It’s not as if he has some sophisticated plan undergirding his behavior… if he’d had a few extra brain cells to work with, he wouldn’t have been so obvious from the get-go.
I swear, this show can be depressingly educational, if only by accident.