Here we go again:
Mel Schilling (left) reveals how Married At First Sight Australia helps her learn things about people and relationships. Kerry Harvey reports.
Why Mel Schilling returned to Married At First Sight Australia.
Over five seasons of Married At First Sight Australia, relationship expert Mel Schilling has come in for nearly as much flak as some of the contestants but she and the show are sticking together. Last year, tens of thousands of Australians signed a petition calling on her to be fired because they didn’t like the way she handled one particular conflict but, undeterred, Schilling is back for a sixth season. “Every year I learn something new about people in relationships. Where else as a behavioural scientist do you get to observe people in such proximity and under such incredible pressure?” she says. “I think the people who go on the show are so incredibly courageous. I don’t have the guts. I would not have the courage to be that vulnerable and that open and exposed.” Schilling says it is the opportunity to learn about relationships – on both a professional and personal level – and to also help viewers at home learn that brings her back to the show. “That’s the reason I keep coming back. I love the entertainment, of course, but I’m not just there for that,” she says. “The thing that gets me out of bed every morning on this show is the idea
that I might be with a couple or talking to an individual on the show and share some advice or some insights that somebody at home might go, ‘Oh wow, that’s me. That applies to me or that’s how my
partner behaves or maybe I could try that with my partner or my friend or my mum’.
“That notion that someone at home might take a little morsel that they’ve seen in the show and apply it to their own relationships is one of my true motivators.”
Schilling says she is no stranger to the hard world of modern-day dating and freely admits that she met her husband on the dating site e-Harmony.
She often applies what she learns on MAFS to her own relationship.
“I remember one time I was giving somebody advice and I thought, ‘I need to take this advice in some of my own relationships. I need to take my own medicine’. It definitely does cross over into the personal.”