Married at First Sight in Oz was an eye-opener
I’M A man. Let’s be clear about that. I do lots of man things. I enjoy football. I have hair on my chest. More than is strictly necessary, if we’re being honest. I can quote several lines from Goodfellas. I’m such a typical man I present a podcast. A podcast about football.
My point is, it’s very important that you bear in mind just how manly a man I am as you read this column.
At some point last week, I found myself watching two 20-something Australian women swap make-up tips on an Instagram live video.
I clicked on this video of my own volition, and at no point did I think ‘I should really switch this off and talk to one of the lads about Roy Keane’.
The video was hosted by Domenica Calarco, whose Instagram page I’ve chosen to follow, and featured her friend Ella May Ding. That friendship was formed on a television show called Married at First Sight Australia, and I have watched 37 episodes of it.
In the past, if I’d seen my wife watching it I would have looked up from my phone and spouted a comic gem along the lines of ‘more like Married at First S***E haha!’ This time, I was hooked.
For those of you who haven’t seen it, Married at First Sight involves couples who’ve never met before exchanging vows, after which they spend months in each other’s company and endure challenges designed to test their compatibility.
Every week the couples attend a commitment ceremony, at which they must decide whether to stay for another week or leave the experiment (it’s called ‘the experiment’ in order to make everyone feel a bit better about watching a show where hot people shout and s***). These will invariably be billed as ‘the most explosive commitment ceremony yet’. Particularly eventful ceremonies will, we’re told, ‘rock the experiment to its foundations’.
Their other weekly ritual
is the dinner party, at which participants are handed progressively larger glasses of wine until they start screaming at each other.
A wine glass was at the centre of this season’s biggest talking point. Domenica was one of the show’s more outspoken characters, but her anger was reserved for those who deserved it.
Bullies such as Carolina, who treated her husband Dion with utter contempt. That contempt, incidentally, seemed to stem entirely from the fact that he “doesn’t go to the gym, like ever. And he doesn’t eat breakfast”.
Olivia Frazer was relatively drama-free in the early stages, content to enjoy married life with her husband Jackson, a man with all the charisma of a decommissioned ScotRail ticket machine. That changed when she began pursuing a vendetta against Domenica, deploying an impressive array of snide eye-rolls and passive-aggressive comments.
These quickly tipped over towards bullying, at which point MAFS (for that is how we true
fans refer to it) stopped being light escapism and became something more serious.
At another boozy dinner, Olivia continued her cruel goading of Domenica until her target reached breaking point, smashing a glass on the table in frustration and departing in tears.
For the remainder of the season, Olivia incorrectly insisted that Domenica had loomed over her, wielding the broken glass as a weapon. The fact that millions of people would soon see otherwise thanks to the presence of cameras somehow failed to register with her.
Olivia’s nadir came at a later dinner party, when it emerged that she had sourced a nude picture of Domenica from her OnlyFans account. That image was duly circulated around everyone in the experiment, with the notable exception of Domenica’s husband Jack and friend Ella.
Domenica and Jack were ambushed with this information, at which point Jack secured ‘man I would like to take for pint and vigorously shake hand of’ status by declaring that he already knew about her OnlyFans account and couldn’t care less.
Support for his wife from the other women at the table, however, was in short supply.
Aside from the mature and empathetic Ella, they either giggled or blamed her for creating the image in the first place. Suddenly the show was dealing with issues of consent and s***shaming, and few participants covered themselves in glory. Their behaviour was rightly denounced by the show’s team of relationship experts.
Domenica, meanwhile, refused to be shamed and carried herself with dignity. Olivia claims that she has lost her job as a result of her actions on the show, while Domenica has gone on to become a hugely popular personality in Australia and beyond.
Big Brother contestant ‘Nasty’ Nick Bateman’s underhand tactics at the dawn of reality TV seem quaint in comparison.
A show that many – including myself until very recently – would have dismissed as throwaway fluff provided a very modern morality tale.
Olivia suffered real world consequences for attempting to shame another woman, while Domenica emerged as a positive role model, proud of her sexuality and defiant in the face of bullying.
And she’ll do you a mean smoky eye.
A wine glass was at the centre of this season’s biggest talking point
*Coughs, cracks open beer*
So…uh…how about that Real Madrid game the other night, eh?