When Jamie farewelled her husband Dave to the ever-controversial Partner Swap challenge on Married At First Sight Australia, she didn’t expect he would return a completely different person.
“I was building a future with someone and within a matter of days, everything came crashing down,” Jamie, 28, tells TV WEEK. “I don’t know how he and Veronica’s time went, but I think he realised we might not be as compatible as we thought.”
Jamie and Dave, 36, had been working through the difficult fact that the previous week, Jamie had declared her love for Dave when he did not return the sentiment.
“It didn’t bother me at the time because he had a lot going on with his dad,” the account manager explains.
Then while they are working through that, Jamie is sent to spend two nights with 31-year-old Awhina’s husband, Adrian, 30, while her Dave is matched with Veronica, 32.
During a task, Adrian gives brutal feedback about what he truly thinks about the pair’s intimacy and one-sided love admission.
“It gave me a lot of anxiety because it made me realise, ‘Is my husband even into me?’” Jamie recalls. “It was really alarming.”
Then when Dave and Jamie reunite after their time apart, it results in an explosive fight, and both choose to enter the Dinner Party solo for the first time since joining the experiment.
At the table, the tension between the pair is palpable and Jamie completely breaks down into tears, receiving empathy from everyone but the one person she’d hoped to.
“I was breaking down,” she recalls. “I was sharing my pain. But Dave met me with no sympathy. There was coldness, dismissiveness – it was abrasive. He could see I was broken but he didn’t seem to care.”
“Dave was more concerned about copping retaliation than he was with comforting me that night,” Jamie says. “It was disappointing.”
Jamie is left questioning whether the kind loving Dave she met at the altar all those weeks ago was genuine, or has it all been a facade?
“I just felt like the mask was off,” Jamie declares. “At that point I completely saw him as someone who was playing a role, and he played me. It completely flipped the experiment on its head.”
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