Two brides disagreed on what is fun at a wedding party. Photo / Warner Bros Discovery
OPINION
Read all the recaps and other MAFS NZ stories here.
Married At First Sight takes a “tacky” turn tonight after a surprise bride reveals she would go as far as to “shag” her husband but as for marriage, she has her eye on another groom.
We don’t have the heart to tell her those aren’t the rules of MAFS NZ, so we ding, dong ditch to go check in with Mike, who is nursing a broken heart after Kara questioned his intentions.
“Feeling a bit deflated after what happened at the pool party yesterday,” Mike tells us as he eats his emotional support snack. We’ve never related more to a MAFS NZ groom, and while we embrace the bonding moment of knowing we both eat our feelings, Mike reminds us why we are really here. “The connection definitely feels a little severed.”
Oh yes. Heartbreak. Siri, play some violins, please.
In an effort to remind the couple why they are here in the first place, the producers decide it’s time to give them back their rose-coloured glasses and send them off to the one place that either results in a make-up smooch or scoffing down food to avoid crying.
We are of course talking about a wedding and not Britomart McDonalds at 1am.
Yup, just in case you thought we were done with weddings, think again. There is a surprise and it starts with “here” and ends with “comes the bride”.
On cue, 31-year-old Cara makes her grand appearance and quickly tells us she is a property consultant. “You could think of it as New Zealand’s equivalent to Selling Sunset,” she says.
We tell her MAFS NZ is New Zealand’s version of Married At First Sight Australia. It’s equally impressive.
Trying to one-up us, she shares another fun fact about herself. “I have been called Chrishell a couple of times.” We nod and squint our eyes and you know what? We kind of see it. “But I do take my job very seriously.”
Finally, something we can agree on.
Then, it’s time to meet Jesse. His CV is similar, but instead of identifying as a Netflix reality star, he identifies as a golden retriever. We aren’t sure anyone has ever explained to him what a doppelgänger is.
Unfortunately for this good boy, he’s in the dog box after telling his family his big news. His sister is the first to point out his mistake. “If I’m getting married on Friday and you’re getting married on Sunday, that doesn’t leave time to get to your wedding.”
Jesse isn’t going to let his sister’s actual big day ruin his reality TV big day and takes his wagging tail to Vanuatu to meet his bride, where he immediately impresses her.
“Where are you from?” he asks Cara.
“Christchurch, yourself?” she says.
“Oh cool, Jesse - I mean,” he replies as his life flashes before his eyes.
The ice is broken, just like Cara’s hope of finding the G Flip to her Chrishell Stause. It feels like a perfect time to exchange vows.
After becoming husband and wife, Cara tells us Jesse isn’t the usual guy she would go for but he is “good-looking” so she’s willing to give it a go. As for Jesse, he thinks she’s good-looking, and Nate quickly agrees. Maddy agrees not to slap him.
While the new couple undergo the awkward task of getting pictures, we head back to the wedding party, where Steph asks Mike and Kara how they are feeling.
“I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night,” Mike confesses. He was too busy thinking of a perfect analogy for this exact situation.
“When you’re stuck in the jam jar, you don’t know what the label looks like, so sometimes someone’s got to pull you out, like that’s the label, that’s the flavour.”
Things always sound good at 1am, don’t they?
Steph needs a minute. Meanwhile, Piripi has developed a man crush.
“Damn, the jam jar? That was good.” He giggles.
Kara brings everyone back to the main issue at hand. “I’m a strong independent b**ch and I’m finding it hard to be looked after.”
Crickets.
She senses she hasn’t got enough giggles to take out the NZ Comedy Fest and shares her own analogy. “It’s like speed bumps, don’t hit ‘em at 100km/h.”
Mike evil eyes her. Analogies are his thing.
Over at Jesse and Cara’s wedding photoshoot, they geek out over working in finance and start bonding, until Jesse reveals he’s “pretty much 30″ and proceeds to act pretty much 20.
“I had a quick yarn to Piri, he was like ‘It’s crate day on Sunday! Hopefully we can’, and then he was like, ‘just a couple long-eys’.”
Cara giggles to stop herself from crying then shares her real thoughts with us.
“It’s been two hours,” she says. “We’ll see,” sounds promising.
The grooms head off for another deep and meaningful and instead of revealing any secret children, this time we grab the tissues.
Jesse asks the lads why they went on MAFS NZ and is expecting surface-level answers but the boys are more ready to talk than Princess Diana was in her 1995 interview with BBC.
“I haven’t really had a functional dating life pretty much ever,” Piripi explains. “I wasn’t very nice in the loyal sense.”
We flashback to his chat with expert Jo and he reveals he had cheated on his ex-girlfriend when he was younger. “I can reflect on that and see what’s happened, it’s quite hard to speak kindly to yourself in your head.”
Jo digs deeper, asking him why he did it and he says it’s all to do with attention, explaining he was “too uncool for the cool kids” in school, and once he received attention outside of his relationship, he says, “It was kind of nice to be wanted.”
Anybody else experiencing a sudden onset of allergies?
Confessing he wants to be a “good man”, we immediately pause, grab the champagne and pop it.
This is what growth looks like.
Over at the bride’s table, Cara forgets she is on MAFS NZ and not Love Island. She immediately tries to figure out who is actually into their husband and who could be up for a swap.
“Out of the five husbands, shag, marry, kill,” she announces to the group.
It’s like my mum always says, if you’re playing shag, marry, kill at your wedding, you’ve probably picked the wrong guy.
“That’s savage,” Steph declares.
Kara’s found her soul sister, while Sam isn’t impressed. “It just feels really tacky to play a game like this. I get the whole keeping it light and making it fun and stuff but when it’s your husband and other people’s husband’s that are just over there, it just feels like a really wrong time to be doing it and just wrong in general.”
James might be the school teacher in the relationship, but the only person we’ve learned from today is Sam. Unfortunately, just like the naughty kids in school, we all ignore her.
Cara goes first. She chooses to shag her husband and marry Piripi. Steph doesn’t like the sound of that, so naturally her on-screen BFF Kara with a K jumps in to make her feel better.
“I’d shag your husband,” she says looking at Steph. Clearly one of us misread the situation. “And marry your husband,” she says to Cara, immediately asserting dominance.
Cara with a C will now be referred to as “CJ”. It stands for Chrishell Junior.
Steph says she would shag Nate and marry Jesse. Then it’s Sam’s turn.
We get closer to the edge of our seat and wait with anticipation. Will she? Won’t she? it’s more intense than the 2023 Rugby World Cup final but unlike the All Blacks, Sam pulls through with the win.
“I’d marry my husband,” she says, “but I’d shag yours,” she adds, pointing to CJ. Meanwhile, Maddy reveals she would shag Piripi and wouldn’t marry any of them by choice, but if she had to, it would be Jesse.
We already know the producers are going to use this for ammo later.
Over at the lads’ chat, the deep and meaningful conversations continue, and Nate reveals that his last girlfriend broke up with him over text. It strikes a nerve, and the gentle soul starts crying. ”It broke me, to be honest.”
“Aww, Nate’s having a cry,” Maddy shouts from the table, “Good on him for being vulnerable, yeah babe!”
We aren’t sure what to do with these healthy expressions of feelings and wonder if a moonwalk out of here would be inappropriate.
At least we’ve got a week to work on our emotional intelligence.
Married At First Sight New Zealand airs on Three and ThreeNow every Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.
Lillie Rohan is a London-based reporter covering lifestyle and entertainment stories who joined the Herald in 2020. She specialises in all things relationships and dating.
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