After 13 stints as a relationship expert on Married At First Sight, you’d think Dr John Aiken would have seen it all.
But this season, an overly confident, assertive group of brides – who “band together” and dub themselves The Boss Babes – near left him speechless!
“They are very overpowering and they really try to control the experiment, the group, and they go at any man or woman that stands up to them,” the psychologist tells Woman’s Day of the MAFS stars most likely to spark the big conversations.
“They have very heated exchanges with the experts as well.”
The long-running reality show has never been short on drama in the form of cheating, couple-swaps and catfights, but John explains this season, viewers can expect plenty of fireworks from these dominating brides alone.
“In the past there’s been one or two women that might have had rivalries but we haven’t seen this dynamic en masse,” he reveals.
“The language they use towards others is incredibly, at times, blunt and hurtful. The hostilities at the dinner parties are at another level – it’s quite confronting.”
Predicting that the five or six brides in the group will be ‘polarising’ for viewers, John reveals it ultimately created a “big divide” between the women and men, but also the brides who didn’t agree with their behaviour.
“It becomes this very, very fraught and tense environment any time they all come together,” he explains. “The Boss Babes say, ‘We’re girls’ girls, we’ll speak our truth, look out, we’re coming’, and I think people often mistake being honest with talking in ways that are disrespectful and offensive.
“That’s one of the talking points in this show – if you are talking in a way that really is hurtful, just because you’re saying this is your truth, it doesn’t necessarily mean you should be putting it in that way.”
Hinting at potential issues for the grooms matched with these brides, John says, “You are left wondering, can you actually have a relationship, an intimate one or friendship, if you act and talk in that way?”
Aside from the headstrong group of brides, viewers can expect some other interesting personalities and storylines in the mix – including the first bisexual woman to take part in the show.
“[She] says, ‘Match me with a man or woman, it doesn’t matter’, and it surprised me,” John says. “That’s a very intriguing storyline because she’s walking down the aisle not knowing whether she’s going to meet a man or a woman.”
There’s also some unconventional, rather modern takes on marriage – including one bride’s unique take on how relationships should be all about the right balance of ‘pink jobs and blue jobs’.
“We have one particular person who’s really big on TikTok and believes relationship success is based on pink and blue jobs, which I hadn’t heard of before,” John explains. “She wants a guy who makes her feel baby pink, and that guy has to be blue.
“She’ll give an example like a blue job is loading the dirty dishes into the dishwasher and a pink job is [her] unloading the clean dishes, a pink job would be her going to Ikea and picking out the furniture, and the blue job would be him buying it and putting it in the car and putting it together when they get home.”
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