Married At First Sight Australia relationship expert John Aiken. Photo / Jason Oxenham
There are a lot of things Married at First Sight expert John Aiken misses about New Zealand, from his friends to the food and wine.
The former cricketer-turned-relationship specialist “did a lot of growing up” in Aotearoa, is married to a Kiwi, Kelly Swanson-Roe, and wants to keep his kids connected with New Zealand.
“The kids love it, and it’s a different culture to Australia, so it’s fantastic to get them to reconnect with it,” he told the Herald amid a holiday break in Auckland last December.
But despite that, he’s adamant he has no plans to move back - although he is making something of a comeback to New Zealand very soon. He’s set to appear on the panel of experts on Married at First Sight New Zealand, which is returning to our screens on Three and ThreeNow later this year.
“I loved being given the opportunity to come on board. It’s exciting, it’s fresh,” he says.
“It’s an experiment that has [marked differences from] the Australian version, so it was very exciting to be a part of it. And the cast are very authentic. And all of them have their own backstories, which I found really fascinating. So I think in terms of the show coming back, we’re really trying to start it again from fresh.
“We’ve got a great team here. We’ve got a great cast ... I’m very excited about the whole thing.”
And while the Kiwi contestants may have slightly different temperaments to their Aussie counterparts, Aiken says he still gets the chance to “call out bad behaviour and go at them in a hard way”.
“[I’m] getting them to essentially look at themselves and see if they can change, and just watching them in a very intense pressure-cooker. There’s some real twists and turns in it, and I think New Zealand are really going to fall in love with it.”
But before that, the newest season of MAFS Australia will air on February 5 in New Zealand — and Aiken promises a “relatable” cast as well as the usual serving of drama, which seems to ramp up each year.
The reality show has drawn criticism over the years regarding participants’ toxic behaviour, along with the rise of social media and the impact of the spotlight on the couples’ mental health.
It’s a different world than when the show first started, Aiken admits.
“The people that began on season one, two and three were very different to the people that are applying now, because social media is a big thing. It wasn’t there when I first started,” he explains.
“So you’ve got TikTok, you’ve got Instagram, Snapchat, people are out there doing podcasts, and you’ve got OnlyFans now.
“All of them are aware of what’s out there. All of them have an ability to cope with cameras in the spotlight, but they also want to find love. They do want things after the show, but they also want to fall in love.”
Duty of care has never been so important for reality TV participants - and Aiken says MAFS has social media training and psychologists available throughout filming to help the cast cope with the spotlight.
Something viewers might not realise is how much of a negative impact that spotlight can have on the experts themselves, as Aiken admits he’s found it “difficult to cope with” at times.
“Generally speaking, as you go through your day, people aren’t going to come up to you and give you a serve about something. But when you’re on a show, they do. People have crossed the road to have a go at me about certain matches or about what I’ve said, or they’ve interrupted me having a phone call just so they could give me some juicy feedback,” he says with a laugh.
“That’s always been something that I’ve found interesting, in that when things are going wrong in the experiment with the participants, the blowback’s often on me.
“And I’m like, ‘Okay, yes, I did put them in there, but I can’t be totally responsible for what they’re doing’. But in saying that, that’s been a part of it, and I’ve had to learn to get a much thicker skin.”
For Aiken, someone who handled the pressures of the job expertly was Dr Trisha Stratford. The Wellington-born TV presenter-turned-neuropsychotherapist sat on the couch next to him on the show for seven seasons, ultimately leaving the show because she felt people were taking part for the wrong reasons. In September last year, her family shared the devastating news she had died at the age of 72. Now, Aiken remembers her as an “amazing woman”.
“As far as I was concerned, whenever she was in the room, she was always the smartest person and she had this calm voice of reason. She never got flustered,” he muses.
“Participants could throw all sorts of things at her, and she would just stay in her lane and manage it beautifully. So I loved that about her. I also admired her immensely because she had done a lot of things, not just in New Zealand, but right around the world.
“She was a war correspondent. She was New Zealand’s first sports presenter on TV. She then retrained and became a neuropsychotherapist, then was front and centre on one of the biggest shows around the world.”
Aiken adds that what he admired most about her was she “showed people that you can actually do a lot of different things in your life and be successful at them”.
“I miss her a lot.”
He recalls when he and Stratford first started out on the show, and “were just laughing about the fact that this would never ever have another series”.
Eleven years later, it’s one of the biggest reality TV juggernauts in the world.
So all these years later, what’s the secret to its enduring appeal? Chances are you’ve dismissed it as just another trashy TV show, then been drawn in against your will — and now you’re hooked.
“I think people watch it to learn what not to do when it comes to relationships,” Aiken notes.
“It’s a show where singles watch it to learn how to date better and how to avoid certain people or traits, and couples watch it as well, to learn how to do things differently.”
Others are simply watching for the drama — he adds that people tell him it reminds them of high school.
“It reminds them of times where they’ve got all these little cliques, times where they’ve been rejected or they’ve fallen in love and they’ve been deceived, and you’ve got the little groups that form — and they just feel like they’re 17 again, watching it. And it drags them in.
“I think also, there’s an element of the experts.
People are watching it to see what we say. But also, they watch it to go, ‘Oh, these experts don’t know what they’re talking about. Why’d they match those two?’ So when you put all that together, I think there’s a whole lot of different reasons why people watch it.”
Stream Married At First Sight Australia first on ThreeNow from Monday, February 5. New episodes drop every Sunday - Wednesday with episodes screening on Three at 7pm the same days.
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