If you’re watching the 2025 season of Married At First Sight (MAFS) you’ve gone through a lot of disappointment. We started with a whole bunch of successful-seeming couples, only for controversies (Paul Antoine punching a wall) and shock plot twists (Dave going off Jamie) to ruin everything. Only one couple, in my eyes, remains strong – Rhi and Jeff. And they’ve dated before.
Initially, I found the fact that producers had paired Rhi Disljenkovic with her “ex”, Jeff Gobbels, to be a total joke. This is MAFS. The brief is putting two strangers together and watching them fall in love or fall into bickering hell. It’s not “watch two people already into each other just… continue to be into each other”.
Except their story wasn’t that at all. Before the show, Jeff and Rhi had dated briefly. They slept together, and then Jeff — in a classic modern dating move — ghosted Rhi. Their reunion was awkward, and it was hardly the reunited lover’s story I had expected it to be.
Throughout the series, Rhi and Jeff have had to navigate the fallout of this ghosting. Rhi was afraid to rekindle their sex life because, well, starting it up seemed like the catalyst for Jeff to dump her like a hot potato in the first place. They had been thrown back together after their relationship seemingly fizzled out, which left them with plenty of miscommunications and loose ends.
Great news: Their love story blossomed. In the context of the MAFS experiment, Rhi and Jeff realised why they clicked in the first place, but most crucially, they were in a position to work on their relationship instead of throwing it in the nearest bin fire when things got hard.
MAFS hasn’t had a great track record for successful couples. Aside from a few raging success stories like Martha and Michael from season 6, Bryce and Melissa from season 8 and, of course, the golden couple of MAFS, Jules and Cam, most make it to the final vows only to implode within days, weeks, or months. These days, the show is just known for producing influencers who start podcasts.
This isn’t exactly surprising, given the format.
MAFS is meant to be about committing to exploring a new relationship while getting very intimate, very fast. But you’re doing this with someone you barely know. The chances you will actually click are slim, even if the “experts” (producers) are lining you up with someone who, on paper, should work with your personality and values.
Think about it — how rare is it to meet someone you actually like when it comes to dating?
No wonder these MAFS couples just seem like two people indifferent to each other, just slogging it through the weeks to ramp up their Instagram following.
On the flip side, a couple like Rhi and Jeff have a real chance. Their initial relationship was impacted by both parties having just come out of long-term relationships. Dating for such a short time, their communication was non-existent. They had no skin in the game, so Jeff ghosting Rhi wasn’t really him ghosting Rhi. He was just walking away from some woman he barely knew but was definitely not ready to get to know on a deeper level.
Including this type of relationship in the MAFS experiment makes way more sense than throwing a couple of strangers into it. Rhi and Jeff knew they had an initial spark; they just didn’t know if there was anything deeper than a surface-level interest and some possible physical chemistry.
Their story is a tale as old as time for modern dating. Ask any single person in Australia what’s frustrating about dating in 2025, and I bet they say it’s the constant false starts.
With apps and DMs, plus a patience level that’s plummeted to hell, we’re constantly getting to know new romantic flames, only for them to mysteriously burn out before we’ve even let down our walls. Ghosting is rampant. Weak excuses to stop seeing each other, all the rage. It feels impossible to get beyond the surface level and start building anything real with anyone.
It’s what MAFS was originally all about. An experiment that MADE couples work on a new relationship to see if an initial spark could deepen into something sustainable. It worked for years because becoming an instant influencer from being on TV wasn’t a guarantee yet.
Once everyone cottoned onto the fact that you could just plough through the series, dump your partner and make a living off just being yourself on social media, the quality of couples declined.
I’ve been so bored of Jacqui and Ryan, for example.
I can tell that Jacqui is playing it all up for the cameras, creating what would usually be TV gold — the chaotic odd couple — for screen time. It feels inauthentic.
But sure, let’s keep some chaos, some of the inauthenticity and the terribly-matched couples. Keep the drama. The thing is, I’m equally sick of the “genuine” couples I simply don’t believe in. I feel like I can see the cogs working in their brains, figuring out that if they stick around until Final Vows, they get maximum screen time.
So what I’m thinking is — more of these couples that dated briefly before the show. Bring ‘em on!
Give me situationships and two-month fizzle outs and all of the carnage from modern dating. There will be chaos because some people really are terrible for each other, and ghosting was probably a courtesy. But there will be others, like Rhi and Jeff, where we get to watch people fall in love who almost lost it all. That appeals to me far more than strangers-to-fake-lovers.
Give us some chaos, but give us some real love stories for once, too.
You can watch Married At First Sight on Nine or 9Now.
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