Gasp. Photo / Warner Bros. Discovery
OPINION
Tonight’s episode of Married At First Sight NZ includes so much scandal we almost expected a cameo from Kerry Washington, but then we remembered — ah, cost-of-living crisis.
While we all scramble to pull together our coins, one thing is certainly in excess, and that’s drama. A groom has claimed he is being gaslit, while another reveals he’s worried he’s accidentally married his mum and not his wifey for life.
It’s less weird and more sad, but more on that later. First, we have a dinner party to attend where Steph’s taunting Jesse with the consequences of his own actions. It’s worse than Mum telling us Santa won’t come this Christmas if we don’t eat our greens.
“Piri had said in the car ride to the commitment ceremony that you had asked the boys if she [CJ] was hot or whatever,” she nonchalantly tells Jesse. “And they had said yes or whatever, and you said, ‘oh, you should see her in the morning without makeup’.”
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It’s the first John and Jo have heard of it. Jo’s so physically hurt by the comment, she’s curled over with tummy pains, while John’s covering his face and mentally disappearing to his happy place — aka anywhere but here.
“I know I said she dresses herself up and dolls real hard, but it’s a good thing.” Jesse tries to cover his tracks, he doesn’t want coal for Christmas. “I don’t remember saying she doesn’t look good without makeup on, though.”
Meanwhile, Piripi has his eye on a brand-new Matchbox toy car and isn’t about to sacrifice his Christmas wish list for Jesse. “I think the reason I remember that so vividly is because it was a comment that took me by surprise,” he hits back.
Jesse has a severe case of amnesia or, as we like to call it, lie, deny, cry — the sinister sister of live, laugh, love.
“What was it that I said word for word?” he asks. We’d say roll the tapes, but the camera crew were MIA when the controversial moment occurred. Thankfully, Piripi wasn’t.
“What you said was ‘do you guys think she’s attractive’? And we ...” Piripi says, when suddenly everything comes back to Jesse.
“Ugh, okay. Damn,” he says, shaking his head and accepting defeat as he mentally crosses Piripi off the boys’ trip 2025 list.
By the time Mike and Kara arrive, the room is one big boiling pot and Kara forgot to do arms at the gym today, so best believe she’s ready to stir it.
Grabbing her handy-dandy wooden spoon, the bride says to Piripi in front of Steph and Mike, “Sometimes you can lose who you are when you’re trying to fit into what someone else wants.”
We wait for Mike to say something positive, but he seems to have taken a vow of silence after Kara wouldn’t let him have pancakes for breakfast yesterday.
It’s an act that is concerning to absolutely everyone — except his wife.
“I don’t know if he’s low energy because he’s genuinely low energy, or just because he’s been asked to take a step back,” Kara tells us. “I don’t trust him.”
Before we can pull up a chair, grab a glass of wine and ask for the full exposé, the experts walk into the dinner party and take the wooden spoon off Kara. It’s their turn to stir the pot.
“We have some very serious news,” John tells the group.
We secretly pray it’s not an announcement that the show will run for an extra half-hour tonight.
“After much deliberation and consideration, CJ has, in fact, left the experiment,” he adds.
We’re shocked, but not as shocked as Jesse. “No way,” he says. He’s devastated, just look at him. Absolutely devastated.
“I’m sad, gutted,” he tells the confession cam. We offer more adjectives for him to use: heartbroken, unhappy, sombre. He declines to use them and adds, “It’s kind of like a failure, I guess.”
The experts tell him his time in the experiment is over, so, naturally, Jesse uses his last few minutes rehashing the brush-gate saga all over again and we slip out of the room to a place where toothbrushes don’t exist.
The following day, the couples are preparing for the second commitment ceremony, and Kara has been practising her pot-stirring all night. In fact, she’s managed to brew up a big ol’ pot of ambush soup.
“I haven’t raised the attractiveness with Mike yet,” Kara smirks, referring to the comment that Mike doesn’t find her attractive. “I’d like to do it in front of the group, because if the boys have heard it and he says ‘yes’, he is attracted to me, then they can go ‘well, you said that you’re not’.”
We wonder how MAFS can be bad for our health when moments like this exist.
Attending the commitment ceremony, the couple sit down on the couch of accusations and passive-aggressive comments, where Kara declares to the experts, “We have a disconnect.
“Mike’s really positive and wonderful and says everything so greatly, but I never really see any raw emotion.”
What do you mean babe? Mike literally walked into the bathroom yesterday because he was so sad. What do you call that, other than raw emotion? A planned escape?
“It’s been an intense process,” Mike fires back. “Kara’s quite reactive, and I feel like those emotions, I’m afraid of them, like when it’s volatile, and it kind of like shuts me down.”
“I don’t necessarily buy it,” she tells him.
“But this is what I’m struggling with,” he sighs. “When I’m starting to share and open it’s almost like a gaslight, like ‘that’s not how you’re feeling, it’s not real’ and it’s a struggle.”
We sit on the edge of our seats. Meanwhile, Mike’s pushed Kara off hers with the gaslight comment and she’s decided when they go low, you go lower.
“I hear something to my face and then I hear something different behind my back, so how do I believe what’s real?” She says. “Like, are you attracted to me?”
We consider handing her a mirror. Have you seen yourself, queen?
“Yes I’m attracted to you,” Mike says
“Well, I heard at the boys’ night you said you’re not attracted to me,” she tells him.
“Well that’s emphatically false,” Mike bites back.
His ploy to distract us with a big word has worked, but Kara studied the dictionary last night. She already knows what it means, and she isn’t having a bar of it.
“So people are just coming up to me and making it up?” she asks.
We cut back to the moment in question where Mike confessed he doesn’t feel a strong sexual urge towards Kara and instead of owning his comment, he tells Kara he obviously meant it in a spiritual way.
Sexually? Spiritually? Potato, potaaato.
“It was a more spiritual thing, like lining up spiritually,” Piripi says, backing up his fellow groom, and Mike gives him a spiritual high five.
“I’m feeling gaslit,” Kara declares to the confession cam. “I just feel crazy and it’s like I just feel so deflated.”
We go to the decision and expect Kara to have her main character and storm out of there. Instead, the tables turn and now we’re getting gaslit.
This wasn’t a part of the deal.
“I know you’re a genuine, good person with a big heart, and this decision definitely wasn’t easy for me, so with that said, I’m ready to see how this would look in the real world,” she says as she holds up her card that says stay.
Being a fulltime gaslitee is tiring so we check in with Sam and James who give us a much-needed break and tell us about their biggest drama this week.
“He was using a fork to make his eggs,” Sam says, looking affectionately at her husband.
“And she put it away,” James chuckles. “It was probably the closest we came to an argument.”
Angels, they both decide to stay, and we’re all happy, we even see John smile for the first time this season.
Refreshed, energised and believers in love again, the experts welcome Steph and Piripi to the couch.
“I am feeling a little bit drained at the moment,” Piri tells the experts. “Just trying to keep up my usual self while showing a lot of my other self, is just certainly tough.”
We knew Hannah Montana made living a double life look too easy.
“I’ve said like five years down the track he would be a perfect partner for me,” Steph exclaims. “When he’s found his path and he’s a bit more certain about his career and like who he wants to be as a human, it would be perfect for me, but right now it’s almost like a mothering relationship.”
Oof.
“Yeah I kinda don’t like the whole mothering thing,” Piri says. “I do feel like you say ‘good job’, it feels very condescending like giving me praise for small things. It feels like I’m treated like a dog.”
We would love to have a cheeky comment to say here, but Kara beat us to it. “If you’re going to be a dog, be a wolf, give her a bit of bite,” she giggles to the confession cam.
“It doesn’t really feel like I’m seen as somewhat of an equal in the relationship,” he tells the experts.
“I feel Piripi hasn’t allowed me to soften and move on from this mothering role because he’s, how do I say, a child,” Steph says.
John immediately jumps in, “Well, that’s ultimately saying what he’s feeling like and when he’s with you, he becomes the child and you’re the mother.”
“Exactly, and tell me someone who wants that,” Steph says, delivering her final blow. “I feel like he’s so concerned trying to be the man I want him to be, he’s going to miss the mark completely by not being himself.”
John and Steph then come up with a plan for how Piri can start behaving in school and reach his term targets.
And we write down our classes for next week — MAFS NZ Sunday, Monday and Tuesday on Three and ThreeNow.
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.
River Haven features a cafe, vineyard, wellness space, and The Bugger Inn pub.