Sometimes I just don’t have the emotional bandwidth to watch a series of Married at First Sight UK, a.k.a. MAFSUK, because it is one of the most stressful and at times blankly horrifying things on TV. All reality dating and marriage shows are a potent mix of boring and stressful, including Love Island, where the holy grail is simply deciding to ‘be exclusive’. But MAFS gets so raw and so ugly, so fast. The only good thing about it is that it puts paid to the ludicrous but increasingly popular idea that arranged marriages are the answer to society’s dating woes.
Darkness nips and bites at all MAFS seasons, and frequently engulfs the whole, an effect particularly visible in the ‘dinner parties’ where the contestants goad and gang up on each other and frequently explode. In most series, there are men so brutish that it is hard not to suspect some dark things going on – impressions usually fostered by tense retrospective references to happenings off camera, and sometimes even the enforced departure of a contestant. Some of the women are also concerningly unpleasant and manipulative.
Darkness nips and bites at all MAFS seasons, and frequently engulfs the whole, an effect particularly visible in the ‘dinner parties’ where the contestants goad and gang up on each other and frequently explode
