As MAFSAU's Dave reveals 'love' for another bride, here's the people the cast wished they were matched with
Just this week, Dave Hand, who was married to Jamie Marinos, revealed the bride he thinks he would have been "better" matched with. And his answer was very surprising.
Responding to a follower on TikTok, who posed the question, Dave said: "I would have to say Fifi, Awhina."
But, Dave isn't the only Married at First Sight Australia contestant to suggest he was better suited to someone else.
This season, several participants have voiced similar feelings - on and off screen.
Read on for a list of all the brides and grooms who wanted to marry someone else on season 12.
Dave responded to a fan this week, saying that he would have been better suited to Awhina Rutene, who was married to Adrian Araouzou on the show.
On why he thinks they would have been a better match, he gushed about her qualities, saying: "Her caring nature, her gentle soul, she's the GOAT [greatest of all time]. Love Fifi.
"I tried my best to look after her in there [the experiment] and every time I saw her, I gave her a big hug. I have lots of respect for her."
Dave said that while he hasn't kept in contact with Awhina since filming ended, he wishes her well because she's a "cool chick".
This might come as a shock to viewers, as we didn't see much interaction between Dave and Awhina on the show, other than within group settings. Awhina was very close to Dave's bride Jamie, however, so they may have spent a lot of time together off-camera during hangouts with their other halves.
In an interview with The Tab, Beth Kelly revealed the groom she would have like to have been matched with on season 12.
"The only other person I could see myself with was Billy, just because we've British, because we had that banter," she said, speaking of Billy Belcher who was married to Sierah Swepstone.
Beth wasn't very complimentary of the other men on the show, however, adding: "There were a lot of sh*tty men. I feel like every year, they just find men that get worse and worse and worse.
"I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's just all men are just cr*p, or if it's just Australian men."
During season 12, Beth was matched with Teejay Halkias, but they called it quits before the final vows, as Teejay admitted he didn't feel a deep enough connection with Beth to continue being intimate with her.
Eliot Donovan had quite the experience on MAFSAU. He was initially married to Lauren Hall, but ditched her during the honeymoon. He later returned to the show with a new bride, Veronica Cloherty, but things went left soon after Veronica met Lauren who dished all on Eliot, and the couple never really recovered after that.
Eliot has spoken about who he thinks he would have been better matched with, and it's Katie Johnstone, who left the experiment after the first Commitment Ceremony following the failure of her marriage to Tim Gromie.
Speaking on the MAFS Funny podcast, Eliot opened up about Tim's treatment of Katie, saying: "Tim was a bit weird, we didn't really get along at the bucks party. He wants short, petite and blonde. The way he dealt with it was just brutal. He wouldn't even hug Katie, like she had some deadly virus. I was like dude, give that f***ing girl a hug."
He added: "About me being matched with Katie, that's actually something I really love. You know what I loved about Katie? Her parents were so gorgeous, they were really down-to-earth country people that loved her."
Eliot said that he reached out to Katie after the experiment to wish her well, but it doesn't sound like anything came of the message, as he's now said to be dating Jamie.
After getting his phone back, Adrian took to his Instagram to talk all things MAFS, including details on the bride he wished he was matched with.
In a now-deleted Instagram Story, Adrian said that he'd like to have been matched with his backup bride Maxine.
Although viewers didn't get to see much of their date, Adrian says he and Maxine actually had "a lot in common."
Maxine previously revealed that their date "went well".
Speaking to Yahoo, she said: "My date with Adrian went well. I mean, it was pretty scary and unnatural for me to have a camera filming me, but Adrian seemed comfortable with it which helped.
"I think they matched us because I said I liked dark features. I don't know anything else [about Adrian] because I haven't watched the show, but living with a stranger for three months, there would've been some butting heads!"
While Adrian thinks he would have been better suited to Maxine, his bride thinks otherwise.
Responding to a fan, who asked which two people she'd put together, she wrote on her Instagram Story alongside a photo of her and her son: "Adrian and Jacqui period."
Jacqui has since clapped back on her own Instagram Story, writing: "I feel sorry for her. And with her son in the picture?"
During season 12, Billy joked that he wanted to do a "wife swap" with Adrian, who had gotten close to his wife Sierah.
While at a heated dinner party - which saw Awhina confronting Adrian and Sierah about meeting up - Adrian outed Billy, saying: "What about when you called me and said you wanted to do a wife swap?"
He then showed the message to the rest of the table, who were in shock.
Billy didn't say anything else on this during the rest of the show and quit the series soon after, but since filming has ended, he's been spending lots of time with Awhina, leading fans to think they're more than just friends.
Clint Rice didn't actually say he wanted to be matched with another bride while on the show, but during the photo ranking challenging, he told his wife at the time, Lauren, that he'd place Jacqui much higher and found her attractive.
This didn't go down too well with Lauren, who told the producers that she thought Jacqui looked "rough".
Anyway, Clint and Jacqui are now engaged, so that pretty much says it all.
Married At First Sight Australia is available to stream on Channel4.com.
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Oswald Spark, a teacher who courted her for a year, had accepted a job in Rhodesia and asked Spark to follow him. He'd support her, he said, and she could keep writing poetry. She consented. Their wedding night was 'an awful mess,' Spark said later, 'a botch-up,' and marital relations did not continue for long. But she got pregnant and nearly died of septicemia after giving birth to a son, Robin, toward whom she was never able to muster as much maternal solicitude as he longed for. Oswald turned out to have a 'severe nervous disorder,' in Spark's words, and after two years, she left him. Colonial society horrified her, especially the way white people talked about black people as if they weren't human, but war had broken out and she only managed to make her escape in 1944, resorting to a troopship that had to navigate through enemy waters. She was forced to leave Robin behind; it took her 10 years to win back custody. Wilson frames the next phase of Spark's life as a key to the fiction that was still a decade away, and she's not exaggerating its importance. When Spark arrived in London in 1944, she got a job as a secretary for the head of a clandestine project overseen by the British Foreign Office. In fact, she may already have been doing undercover work. Wilson hypothesizes that she spied for the British colonial government during her last year in Rhodesia, possibly trying to uncover enemy aliens among the settlers. Wilson cites no direct evidence but rather a curious gap in the record of what she was up to, or even where she lived. Spark's new boss was a wildly imaginative and very demanding foreign correspondent of Falstaffian proportions named Sefton Delmer. His outfit, the Political Warfare Executive, conducted psyops from a secret compound north of London. The PWE's mission was 'the successful and purposeful deceit of the enemy'; it produced disinformation in German that was published in a counterfeit newspaper, sent in the form of forged letters and fake secret messages, and broadcast over the radio. An anti-Semitic Nazi talk-show host who ranted drunkenly about corruption and sexual depravity among the party elite from his illegal outpost in the fatherland, for instance, was in reality a German writer of detective fiction employed by Delmer in England. From the February 2001 issue: Dame Muriel's surreal meditation on belief Working for Delmer may have been the best training a future novelist could get. He was fanatical about verisimilitude: All the details in the team's fabrications had to ring true. He hired people from every profession. In addition to writers, he enlisted farmers, psychologists, actors, even cabaret singers, some of them German Jewish refugees knowledgeable about German life. Plus the military fed Delmer the latest intelligence. He was 'omniscient,' Wilson writes, and scary; he liked to play mind games with his own people as well as the Germans. Spark's immersion in 'a world of method and intrigue,' as she put it, taught her about the slipperiness of truth. For the rest of her life, she would be obsessed with—indeed, paranoid about—'codes, secret messages and the circulation of fictions posing as fact,' Wilson writes. Several of Spark's novels feature shady characters spying on one another and hatching whisper campaigns against a defiant but naive heroine. She later was the target of a plot herself. During Spark's brief tenure in 1947 as the editor hired to update The Poetry Review, a stodgy publication overseen by an elderly poetry society, a board member scheming to oust her pried into her life and threatened to use her divorce against her. Spark put this experience to use in more than one novel, most notably Loitering With Intent (1981), probably her funniest. The Poetry Society becomes the Autobiographical Association, whose ridiculous members write their memoirs under the supervision of the director, a snooty character clearly conniving to use their confessions for some sort of skulduggery. Then there was Spark's nervous breakdown in January 1954. Always worried about her weight, an anxiety shared by some of her heroines, she had been taking Dexedrine to control her eating. During the ensuing psychotic interlude, she fixated on T. S. Eliot, whose most recent play, The Confidential Clerk, had a character named Muriel. Convinced that Eliot, whom she had never met, had sneaked encrypted declarations of love for her into the script, she spent months obsessively trying to decode them. This wasn't easy. At one point, Wilson writes, 'Eliot's words started jumping around and cavorting, reshaping themselves in anagrams and crosswords.' A doctor weaned Spark from Dexedrine and put her on antipsychotic medication, and she briefly went into therapy with a Jungian psychologist. But Roman Catholicism restored order to her disorderly mind, Spark said. It made her 'see life as a whole rather than as a series of disconnected happenings.' She put herself in the hands of God, who sees and hears all—God being a preferable eavesdropper and spy to ex-boyfriends and boards of directors. Piety did not make her dogmatic or conservative. She neither went to confession nor renounced abortion, contraception, or divorce, and she embraced doubt. From the November 1965 issue: Muriel Sparks's poem 'Note by the Wayside' Spark's turn to religion coincided with her turn to fiction, which was not an accident. Catholicism allowed her to find her voice as a writer. While editing a volume of the letters of Cardinal John Henry Newman, she had read his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, which details the steps of his conversion to Catholicism and inspired her to begin to take her own. The qualities in his reflections that attracted her—simplicity, concision, a refusal to accept easy answers—double as a good description of the style she was developing. Catholicism itself had aesthetic appeal. She was drawn to its living magic—its 'saints, angels, miracles, and mysteries,' Wilson writes. 'She also liked the paradox, metaphor, sixth dimension and rearrangement of time and space.' For believers, those staples of faith had an immediacy and a proximity to the everyday that Spark may have felt was best embodied in fiction. From the start, in her very first (and prize-winning) short story, 'The Seraph and the Zambezi' (1951)—still one of her best—she effaced the distinction between naturalism and the supernatural. During a Christmas pageant held by a gas-station owner in his rickety garage near Rhodesia's Zambezi River, a six-winged creature appears onstage and proceeds to kick everyone else off it. It's a seraph, straight out of the Book of Isaiah. 'This is my show,' the owner, Cramer, tells it. 'Since when?' the Seraph said. 'Right from the start,' Cramer breathed at him. 'Well, it's been mine from the Beginning,' said the Seraph, 'and the Beginning began first.' Why Catholicism and not, say, Scottish Presbyterianism, the country's Calvinist-inflected denomination of her youth, or her father's Judaism? Spark's love of high style surely rebelled against the austerity of Protestantism, both in worship and creed. (As a writer, however, she made heavy use of the doctrine of predestination, disposing of characters summarily and parodying herself in the figure of Miss Jean Brodie. 'She thinks she is Providence,' a disenchanted student reflects. 'She thinks she is the God of Calvin.') Spark was even more conflicted about Judaism. In The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), a chatty, muddled autobiographical novel, she describes her protagonist going back and forth between her chilly Christian relatives and her warmer Jewish ones and belonging among neither. To one side of the family, she was faintly pitiable because she was half Jewish; the other was kinder, but she felt her lack of Jewish knowledge excluded her from their cozy home rituals. Spark always had the Bible, though, and read it 'with a sense that it was specially mine,' as she put it. She thought God had given a good answer when Moses had asked his name at the burning bush: I am who I am. Was she 'a Gentile' or was she 'a Jewess'? 'Both and neither. What am I? I am what I am,' she writes in her essay 'Note on My Story 'The Gentile Jewesses.' ' Spark's range as a novelist was impressive—one work might adopt the guise of a murder mystery, the next of a ghost story—but she had a signature rhetorical move: prolepsis. The scholar Clare Bucknell came up with a Spark-worthy term for it: the 'auto-spoiler.' In a throwaway remark toward the beginning of a story, the narrator gives away the end. We learn in Chapter 3 of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) that one of the Brodie set will betray her to the school's administration, which is desperate for an excuse to get rid of her. In The Driver's Seat (1970), Spark's most surreal novel and also her favorite, we are told, also in the third chapter, that the tourist disembarking in a Southern European city will have been murdered by the next morning. By revealing the fate of her characters, Spark frees us from the grip of curiosity about what's going to happen and forces us to study why. Who made it happen? What does it mean? Does providence foreordain or do characters have a say? Is everything a conspiracy or does accident play a role? Spark's convictions let her interrogate God's designs without despairing that there are none. As a child, Spark had found God to be 'a charming and witty character' with 'a lot of conflicting sides to his nature,' as she wrote. The worry that crops up in her fiction is that he'll turn out to be a rogue operator like her old boss Delmer. But Spark also admired the God of Job because he was 'not the God of love,' Wilson writes. He was the braggart God who boasted to Job that—in Spark's words—'I made this and I created that, and I can crush and I can blast and I can blow. And who are you to ask questions?' A devoted ironist is the answer: Spark reserved the right not only to ask questions but to admit amusement and dismay into her faith. Anyone can worship a God who doesn't trim himself to the size of the human imagination—that's what God is for, to make sure that we don't mistake our petty schemes for anything other than half-baked. But it takes a Spark to be fond of a God who chest-thumps and is otherwise outlandish—a God who, she writes, 'basks unashamed in his own glory, and in his anger is positively blasphemous.' Because who are we to say how God should behave?
