I do... but who are you?

Married At First Sight returns with six more singletons who’ve agreed to wed a total stranger

The bride is late. The groom is nervous. The guests shift in their seats in the domed reception hall of London’s Institute of Chartered Accountants, decorated with flowers and birch trees.

It’s all par for the course for a wedding. But this is very, very far from your typical trip down the aisle. For when the bride finally walks towards her groom, it will be the first time the couple have ever seen each other.

Bride Stephanie, 32, from Croydon, is a police constable – an unlikely candidate for this sort of caper, you might think – and her groom Ben, 36, is a surveyor, from Bromley. They were selected from among an astonishing number of applicants to take part in an arranged marriage set up by Channel 4’s controversial Married At First Sight. Both failed to find love so are trying the programme’s scientific methods, including personality assessments, hormone tests and examinations of hair strands.

It’s certainly a triumph of hope over experience, given the show’s record so far. All six couples married in the previous two series have divorced – the longest relationship lasted just 34 weeks.

But surprisingly, the poor results didn’t stop more than 4,000 singletons applying for the third series – a big increase on the 1,500 who applied for the first. Executive producer Trish Powell says contestants trust they won’t be exploited. ‘Applicants had seen series one and two and know that it’s not car-crash telly, that there’s a real drive to match well from the experts,’ she says.

However, Powell and the other producers are beefing up the psychological support this time in an attempt to make the three new marriages actually last. They’ve extended the amount of time the couples spend supported in shared accommodation after their marriage from five to eight weeks. ‘It’s more expensive, but other couples have said, “If we’d just had a bit more time”,’ says Powell. Couples are now offered individual therapy as well as marriage therapy off-camera.

The matching process has evolved, too, and new expert, biological anthropologist Dr Jake Dunn, has introduced the hair-strand test, which measures cortisol levels, or stress – an indicator of how people react to difficult situations. This, along with the hormone tests and interviews about personality, likes and dislikes, are used to decide who will work well as a team.

When we meet at a London hotel the day before her wedding, it’s hard to understand why Stephanie, who is funny and very attractive, needed help finding love. But her last relationship ended just over a year ago, when her boyfriend got cold feet while buying an engagement ring.

She has no qualms about an arranged marriage. ‘I don’t know why some people find it shocking,’ she sighs. ‘If it were part of my religion, nobody would bat an eye. All the relationships I’ve chosen for myself didn’t work out – why is this less likely to work than that?’

An hour before the wedding we meet Ben, her groom, eye-catchingly attired in a sharp designer suit and garish purple moccasins sporting a lion motif. ‘I didn’t want to be too flash, but this is me,’ he says. ‘My shoes have lions for courage. Stephanie and I are brave to come today.’

An hour late, the bride walks up the aisle, and the initial meeting is carried out in front of everyone. The omens are good – Ben winks as Stephanie approaches and both laugh. They share a kiss and hold hands while exchanging vows.

A few weeks later, after a honeymoon in Majorca, Stephanie and Ben are still laughing. She confesses, ‘I thought Ben was cute, but he’s not the kind of guy I’d have gone for. He’s a very cheeky chappie, but he’s got a heart of gold. I probably would’ve turned down a gem if we met in a bar.’

Then there’s the million- dollar question – was their marriage consummated on their wedding night? ‘Absolutely not!’ says Stephanie with mock indignation. ‘We just talked a lot.’ They laughed, too, at Ben’s tongue-in-cheek attempt at seduction, a dance to Tom Jones’ You Can Leave Your Hat On, which Stephanie filmed and some of which is in the show.

It takes a year of form-filling and tests for contestants to go from applying to exchanging rings. For Stephanie and Ben, the journey was worth it… so far. ‘We’re doing it a bit back to front,’ admits Ben, ‘but I’d been doing 36 years of front to back, so let’s do it the other way around.’

Married At First Sight returns next month on Channel 4.

Ben and Stephanie on their wedding day