Married At First Sight season 17 just aired its finale episode, and there was one particularly cringy part of the season. Season 17 was a massive failure, with none of the couples opting to stay together. Orion Martzloff asked Lauren Goodger for a divorce after returning from their contentious honeymoon, while Clare Kerr and Cameron Frazer separated on their one-month anniversary. Clare and Cameron attended Decision Day only to say no to each other again.
Emily Balch and Brennan Shoykhet ended things badly a few days before Decision Day but also showed up to Decision Day to say no to each other. Becca Haley and Austin Reed separated a day before Decision Day but came together to both say yes on Decision Day only to break up the following day at a group gathering in front of their Married at First Sight season 17 castmates. Within all the ugly couples’ relationships were underlying group dynamics that led to a particularly cringeworthy development.
Throughout Married At First Sight season 17, the couples got together for group activities, dinners, and other gatherings (via Lifetime,) which proved to create tension among the cast members. Cast members would be pressed about their decision-making, behavior in their marriages, and reasons for treating their spouse a certain way. This created friction among the couples that carried into their post-Decision Day dynamics.
The women’s support for one another turned into a group thought that they were wronged by their husbands and that the men of Married at First Sight season 17 weren’t being honest and checked out early on. This was especially apparent in the finale episode when Emily, Becca, and Lauren had drinks with Orion and Austin and the three women proceeded to call out both men for their faults.
The women of season 17 clearly felt like martyrs and tried to belittle the men and their experience in the process. The women wanted to feel vindicated for having such troubled Married at First Sight journeys, but their approach was cringe and made them look bad. While Clare, Brennan, and Cameron were missing from the finale bar outing, their presence would have surely ignited even more cringe scenarios with the women trying to bash the men.
Becca had a photoshoot with all the Married at First Sight season 17 women that piggybacked on their narrative that they were done dirty by the men of the season. The photoshoot was an effort to make each of the women feel empowered in their bodies after having gone through a difficult experience.
The women of Married at First Sight season 17 had a vendetta against the men. Instead of owning their faults, they projected all the wrongdoing on the men. By calling the men out and not taking ownership of their part in the demise of their marriages, the women fostered cringy situations in which they would try to make the men look bad and themselves better, with the post-Decision Day outing being the worst example. But their tactic didn’t work only proved to make fans feel negatively about the women.
While the men of season 17 did make a lot of mistakes, they often took accountability for their faults and admitted that they could have handled things better. The women, however, were on a crusade to admonish the men. Each of the women also had strong opinions about their fellow cast members’ marriages and how the guys did their spouses dirty. The Married at First Sight hostility was created by the women against the season 17 men and only proved to create cringy situations in which the women came off as bitter.
Source: Lifetime/YouTube
