It has finally happened. After a decade of avoiding the show, my wife and I decided that we would try out the new season of Married at First Sight. We consume quite a bit of reality TV, so it’s not that we avoided it precisely, but something about the idea of watching people struggle to build a healthy relationship amid a storm of cameras and manufactured drama just never drew us in. At least until we watched Love at First Sight and realised it was actually kind of fun.
Relationship drama makes for addictive viewing. But after watching most of a season of weird “marriages”, screaming matches and couch quizzes accompanied by deep and meaningful music, one part of the show has struck me as really weird. Everyone keeps referring to the saga as an “experiment”. From the narrator to the experts who counsel the hapless couples on their relationship dramas, the entire show seems to be calling the experience a social experiment for which we don’t know the outcome.
As a scientist, I found this strange. We’ve had 11 seasons of the show with more than 100 couples getting thrust together over nearly a decade. There’s plenty of data there to analyse and see what “the experiment” shows.
So I did. I collected the data from the Mafs Wikipedia pages – which are wonderfully comprehensive – as well as a bit of Googling. I asked three main questions:
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How many couples stay together until the end of filming?
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How many couples stay together after filming is completed?
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How many couples are still together and is it fewer than we’d expect?
I limited my data collection to 2015-24 to ensure I had enough information on all the show’s participants. I also considered staying together after filming as at least one year of relationship post-show, because it was hard to figure out exactly when people broke up in the months after filming completed. For breaking up before the end of filming, I only counted couples who had left or otherwise stopped being part of the show before the final decision – if one or both of the people said no at the final ceremony, I think we can say they at least completed the experiment.
When you look at the numbers, the results are … stark. Of the 107 couples paired off in the eight years, 56 (52%) broke up before the show ended. The most likely result for two people who meet at their Mafs wedding is to call it quits within the 10-week period of filming.
Of the 51 remaining couples who made it to the final decision, the outcomes are a little bit better. There were 11 successful marriages in the bunch – the husband and wife managed to make it to at least one full year of bliss. Of these, seven couples are still together today, which sounds OK on the face of it.
In context, however, these statistics are still pretty abysmal. The average length of an Australian marriage is eight to nine years, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. I compared the length of Mafs marriages against the 2021 divorce statistics from the ABS to get an idea of how unlikely this was, using a statistical test called a chi-squared test. This resulted in a probability value – or p-value – of 0.00000000001. Interpreting p-values can be a bit complex but we can say that Mafs couples fall apart drastically more commonly than your average Aussie marriage.
Why are Mafs relationships failing so often? It’s hard to be sure. It could be that marrying someone you’ve just met is a ridiculous idea that rarely works. Perhaps it’s because the people who sign up for the show aren’t that great at relationships by default. Maybe the producers, in their quest for good TV, make the “experiment” just a bit too tumultuous for most couples to survive.
Or maybe there’s something in the marriages themselves. In the US version of the show, couples sign a marriage certificate when they walk down the aisle, which is impossible in Australia due to regulations. In the US, 16% of the couples are still together compared with 7% in Australia, a statistically significant difference with a p-value of 0.037 on that same chi-squared test. Given that the two shows are otherwise pretty similar, we could reasonably say that having a real wedding with a legally binding contract probably helps quite a bit in making the marriages last.
Of course, 16% is still also low. The show has only been on since 2014 in the US, which means that most of the real marriages they’re filming end far sooner than they should.
We can draw a few conclusions from the Mafs “experiment”. It rarely works. It’s much less effective than marrying someone you already know and presumably like, although this might also be influenced by the cameras and producer-generated drama. It’s rare you get to choose another partner partway through your marriage in real life, for example, something that was a big new twist in this year’s season of the show. The experiment is probably particularly ineffective in Australia because the couples aren’t legally married.
All that being said, there are two things going for the whole idea. One is the current nightmare of the dating scene. Marrying someone you’ve never met probably won’t work but it might at least be more fun than trying to meet a partner on Hinge amid the fake profiles and pictures of men holding fish.
Also, it makes great TV. Even if we all know the conclusion from the start – and at this point, we kind of do – the drama makes for compelling viewing.
