A match made for reality TV
Wellington-born neurotherapist explains to Glenn McConnell why she has stayed on Married At First Sight as a resident expert, despite having many other successful careers.
Trisha Stratford is rather impressive. Her credentials include working as a war correspondent and a hostage negotiator. She has worked for the UN, on current affairs show 60 Minutes and has a PhD in neuroscience.
At this point, anything Stratford says further is gloating because no one has time to remember all those details. She is, to put it plainly, incredibly intelligent.
She is not the type of person to spend their days obsessing over reality television, or, she wasn’t.
The Wellington-born neuropsychotherapist now spends months each year working on the Australian version of Married At First Sight, as one of its matchmaking experts.
The show finds random people and marries them at first sight. It then goes a step further, by watching the couples as they cope with the cameras, their new marriage and living with people they’ve never met.
‘‘Would I go on it as a contestant? No, in a word,’’ she says over the phone from Sydney.
In fact, Stratford says she didn’t want to work on the show at all when she was originally asked. It took a lot of encouragement.
‘‘It’s quite a funny story. They got hold of me as I was doing my post-doc research in the lab,’’ she recalls. ‘‘My immediate reaction was, ‘I don’t want to do reality television’.’’
But then, she says the producers at Nine Network kept calling. ‘‘I kept saying, ‘no, no, no’.’’ Now, she’s been working on the show for four years. The fifth season of Married At First Sight Australia has just gone to air, and Stratford has already signed up for a sixth.
‘‘I realised they had fallen in love with the brain,’’ she says. That’s the reason she agreed to take part.
As an academic, Stratford admits she gets strange looks regularly from colleagues about her place on the dating show.
But, if she wasn’t to have gone on the show, she thinks her research would have been used anyway. ‘‘They had fallen in love with the brain, not me.’’
Someone would have gone on quoting her, anyway, she says, ‘‘So I thought: well, I’ll do it’’.
On her way back to New Zealand, after stints in Somalia, Bosnia and a few other places, Stratford was offered work in Sydney. It’s there that she ended up getting her PhD in the neuroscience of relationships.
Then, it starts to make sense why she took up a role on one of the most extreme reality dating shows ever to appear on television.
‘‘I guess you could say it is extreme,’’ she says. ‘‘They’re in a pressure-cooker environment, it’s basically a relationship on steroids.’’
Stratford is certain, too, this pressure cooker dating show is a legitimate experiment.
‘‘Nobody is made to do anything. We don’t test them. There’s no prize at the end, hopefully it’s love. We just put them into a situation that you would be in, in a relationship,’’ she says. Except, ‘‘We condense the first two years of a relationship into a few weeks’’.
At the end of it all, Stratford says she plans to study all of the contestants who have appeared on Married At First Sight.
‘‘I’m fascinated by people and fascinated by why people go on this show,’’ she says.
Each year, 5000 people apply in Australia for the show.
They cull all the applications that appear too lustful for fame. Then, Stratford says she and the other two experts begin testing.
The culling starts in June. It’s not until September when they will finally have their participants selected.
Before then, a shortlist is selected by the show’s experts and presented to the producers.
‘‘I understand we have to have people with good stories. What we try to do is reflect Australian society,’’ she says, when asked if the reality television – or ‘‘unscripted television’’, as she says – is more about entertainment or science.
Back in season one, she says the show ‘‘was a little ob-doc, an observational documentary’’ but she concedes that’s changed in later seasons.
When they filmed season one, Stratford remembers asking: ‘‘Is this show going to rate?’’
It is now played four nights a week. It rates.
In previous seasons, the participants have been forced to share living spaces with each other – something normal couples wouldn’t do. That won’t happen again, she says.
The three experts responsible for matching the couples focus on emotions, resilience and attraction.
There’s even a lab, where Stratford brings each of the participants in to do pheromone testing. There are quizzes, and brain tests to identify each participants’ level of social awareness – that’s after they’re independently assessed to make sure they’re fit for the show. There’s ‘‘attractiveness testing’’ too.
When it comes to smelling each other, though, that’s when things get interesting.
‘‘Pheromones are our strongest sense, smell goes through one synapse to the brain. Sight, four and hearing seven,’’ she explains.
‘‘Sight and smell are the most important. A woman can detect a man’s body odour at a metre.’’
Stratford says people do this without thinking. What they’re doing is trying to suss out their prospective mate’s immune system, she says, to see if they’ll have healthy babies.
With so much effort, the question must be asked: Why do they not succeed in matching more couples? Barely any of the matches actually stay together.
From the four seasons, only two couples are going strong, it seems.
But Stratford doesn’t take any of the blame.
‘‘We’re never going to match them with the perfect person, we’re going to match them with a human being,’’ she says.
The process is difficult, which she says leads to ‘‘a very high expectation’’.
That expectation, given the circumstances, is hard to meet.
Regardless, she says every couple on the show is matched for love.
‘‘Of course, I want them to stay together. That’s why I’m doing this,’’ she says, promising their techniques may have improved this time around.
For the first time, the show has cast the net wider to find a diverse group of participants.
With young, old and culturally diverse participants, she expects better outcomes. ● Married At First Sight Australia screens on Three, Mondays to Thursdays, 7.30pm.