OPINION

Tonight’s episode of Married At First Sight is an exact replica of when you go out with the girls for a couple of tequilas on an empty stomach; chaos, chaos and a lot of texts the next day saying “hey…. Are we still friends?” and “omg, did you hear what Jesse said about CJ?”

Thank god the show is sponsored by hangover food legends, KFC.

Like any good night out, the party starts with the best of intentions as experts Jo Robertson and John Aiken reveal they have a treat for the couples. Another couple! Hurrah.

“You need to see that this process can work,” John tells the lads as he walks into boys’ night with Brett and Jo arrives at girls’ night with Angel from season one. Aka one of two success stories of the entire MAFS NZ franchise.

What outstanding odds.

“I read about you on the Herald!” Piripi shouts as he spots Brett. We immediately blush – who, usssss? The Herald? Straight to the top of the podium for you, doll.

The couple – who just welcomed their second child – are here to give the contestants some advice on how to make it through the experiment and CJ is first up. “How do you get out of the ruts?”

We can see she’s dying to explain brush-gate but Angel is too fast, she’s been watching the show and knows exactly where this is going. “Step back and take a breath and don’t hold on to any grudges.”

“Okay,” CJ chuckles, unconvinced. We ask if she wants it recorded in the meeting minutes that asking a happily married former contestant for romance advice is less insightful than asking Jesse why he bought a toothbrush when he had a perfectly good one at home.

Continuing her five-minute slot in the advice section of the evening, Angel tells the girls, “There’s definitely points in the experiment where it’s like, is this real life? Am I just stuck in a hole?”

And to that we say, yes. Yes you are Angel, welcome back to MAFS, where your wedding present is a broken ladder.

For more Married At First Sight NZ news and all the recaps, click here.

Meanwhile, over at the boys’ night it’s a completely different vibe, as James asks Brett how he and Angel navigated living in different cities and when he decided to move. Brett’s advice? “I guess if you love her man, you’ll do it.”

Someone hold us.

Brett and Angel leave and we half expect James and Sam to follow them into the land of happily ever after but much like the rest of us, they’re forced to stay to hear about Jesse and CJ’s dramas once again.

“She just seems to have these walls up,” Jesse tells the group, preparing to launch attack number 567 on CJ. But there is an unlikely hero in this situation, Mike. He has had enough and if he can’t fix his own marriage, best believe he’s going to tell another groom off for ruining his.

“Everything you’ve spoken about is her, what’s your part in this?” he demands. Jesse is shaken to his core, he is nothing but the victim here.

“At the times where it mattered most to her, where she needed you, you fled, right?”

“No, I didn’t,” Jesse bites back. “She ran away.”

“You both ran away, you’re the f**king same, can you not see that?”

Jesse, who has previously assured us he is very good at dealing with conflict, appears to be more afraid than the straight-A kid being called to the principal’s office and immediately starts agreeing with Mike.

“I dropped some hard truths on him,” Mike tells us, puffing his chest out a bit more to prove he is the alpha.

Everyone decides to head home, take off their heels and jump into bed, until Sam develops an unexpected taste for drama and exposes Mike. That’s the thing about tequila shots, you either fall asleep on the toilets in Saint Alice, or you decide it’s time to spill the juicy goss you’ve been holding on to for weeks.

“James told me not to say anything but…” she tells Kara in the taxi home and the subtitles tell us she’s shown her a text.

SHOW US!

“That’s so f**king interesting,” Kara replies, and we’re starting to feel left out.

Thankfully, it’s not for long and after a good sleep, Kara wakes up and chooses violence.

“Last night I found out Mike’s been telling people he’s not attracted to me,” she says. We give the appropriate response and gasp. “To hear last night after he tells me I’m beautiful to my face that he’s telling everyone that he’s not attracted to me, I’m just so f**king confused.”

Call him out sis!

Kara lures her husband into the kitchen by making a delicious smelling batch of pancakes and just when he’s grabbing the knife and fork to dig in, she strikes, “Your feelings don’t feel genuine to me.”

Mike’s baffled. He’s not him when he’s hungry. “I’m damned if I do, and I’m damned if I don’t,” he replies.

“I know you’re trying to make an effort, but like, I don’t know, were you genuinely upset this morning?”

Mike decides the only way out of this is to reveal the severity of his upset that their marriage isn’t working out: “I couldn’t get out of bed when my alarm went off this morning,” he says.

Getting up at 5.01 instead of 5am still counts as being part of the 5am club, Mike.

“I don’t know what you’re creating here, like what is this?” he asks her.

Kara is at her wits’ end, not only did the pancake she’s cooking burn on the bottom but now she has to mansplain to Mike why she’s upset.

“WHAT IS THIS MIKE!” she screams. “I feel like you are not genuine and you’re hiding behind a big persona and nothing has felt real to me, this whole time, I don’t know where to go from here.”

Mike is terribly upset. He didn’t get up at the same time as the successful CEOs, entrepreneurs and billionaires of the world this morning, and now Kara has found the magic talking fork. What’s next? She closes herself off to getting to know him?

“I said in my vows I’d have an open mind going through this and you know what, now it’s closed,” she tells him and shoves a pancake in her mouth.

It’s the last straw for Mike and he has no choice but to walk into the bathroom and process the fact that on top of everything else, he’s also missed out on some delicious pancakes.

We don’t dare tell him they’re also on their last roll of toilet paper.

Meanwhile, over in Jesseland, he’s exhausted all his friend options inside the experiment and has been forced to call in a mate from beyond the walls of MAFS.

“Having these fights with CJ, it kinda feels like a mind game,” he says. “We fight over something I don’t know about, about the reason of what it is, then we have this other argument, where she’s saying horrible things to me and then fires me up so much that I say something that I regret and she focuses on that and victimises herself.”

We hear you Jesse, but only partly because our little brother just arrived home from school and won’t stop saying, “I know you are, you said you are, but what am I?”

So annoying.

Back at Kara and Mike’s, she’s left him in the bathroom and headed over to CJ’s apartment where the two have a coffee and a yap or as we like to call it, a yappacino – extra hot.

CJ explains she reached out to Jesse and asked him to catch up but had to abruptly pull out of their coffee date when she found out some gasp-worthy information.

“So Steph said to me Jesse was saying to the guys, do you think my wife’s hot and they all agreed that I was and he turns around and goes ‘well, you should see her without makeup in the morning’,” she says. “Like that’s f**king disgusting behaviour.”

Did no one ever tell him three things are off-limits when talking about your TV wife? Toothbrushes, makeup and the real reason you’re on the show.

One more strike and he’s out.

“I’m just not putting up with a man child who thinks he can say these things to me and try and put me down in front of the men,” CJ says.

Before we find out her game plan to bring down her husband, the producers butt in and tell her if she really wants to make a spectacle out of it, she should absolutely do it at the second dinner party.

Why keep it between two people, you know? Share with the group, let them have a show with their meal. We know Steph’s already excited. “Last week I was like drama-free, staying clear of it, keeping my head down whereas this week I’m more like, ‘I need some excitement’.”

Arriving at the dinner party, Jesse walks in alone and John and Jo are immediately more disappointed than when Jesse told his parents he was going on MAFS.

“After having a hard talk to them and hoping things turn around, this looks to me like it’s fallen over,” John says.

One person isn’t disappointed through. “Obviously you haven’t had a coffee with CJ?” Steph asks, trying to hold back a smile.

“Nah, I tried to yesterday. She messaged me in the morning,” Jesse says, reading out the messages and Steph decides it’s time to reveal Dan Humphrey isn’t Gossip Girl, it’s her!

“I feel like I have to come clean,” she tells the room. Everything stops, the cameras zoom in, and we scream “nooooo” when it’s revealed we have to wait until tomorrow.

Married At First Sight New Zealand airs on Three and ThreeNow every Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.

Lillie Rohan is a London-based reporter covering lifestyle and entertainment stories who joined the Herald in 2020. She specialises in all things relationships and dating.