Get Ready For Messy MAFS To Return With New Gay Grooms Included
Australian audiences are familiar with the reality show Married At First Sight (MAFS) where hopeful romantics agree to be paired up blindly with a partner to be married. The latest season, to air from January 29, is the series’ eleventh and will see the return of two gay grooms!
Love Is Blind
The series originated in Denmark and has become an international franchise. The Australian version is among the top-rated reality shows in the country.
With less than a month until the next season premieres, the cast is being unveiled, including grooms Mike Felix and Stephen Stewart. MAFS hasn’t featured a pair of gay grooms on the show since season three back in 2016, a whole eight years ago. The show hosted their first lesbian couple in 2020 with Amanda Micallef and Tash Herz but the couple, similar to 2016’s grooms, did not last long.
There has been some speculation as to whether the gay grooms would be featured at all after Mike’s first partner Simon quit the show early during filming in August 2023. MAFS has featured two LGBTQIA+ couplings on the 11-season run and neither has lasted longer than a few days. This is a point of contention for the show-runners who have expressed in interviews their desire to get it right and not just pair people up because they’re both gay.
MAFS expert Mel Schilling says, “For us it was really important for us to find people who genuinely wanted to find love, and to really delve into the intricacies of their attraction and their types, what that means for them.
“We’re not just saying, ‘You’re gay, you’re gay’… we got that horribly wrong in the early Australian series,” she says.
Hopes are – tentative – that this season’s gay grooms will be a good match.
