Married At First Sight (MAFS) groom Clint Rice has shared what it was really like being paired with bride Lauren Hall on the juicy reality show. And — surprisingly — it wasn’t as bad as you might think.
“Loz is a great person,” Clint told the Daily Mail.
“She’s obviously burnt out from the show. She had a tough start with Eliot [Donovan] and behind humiliated, then coming back in.”
To convince Lauren to give the experiment another crack, the production team apparently made her some promises, including putting her up in a much bigger room. However, Clint says these promises weren’t fulfilled.
“I had to step in and help force some things to happen, like getting a bigger room that she was promised,” he said.
“We put our foot down for a two-bedroom, and we got it in the end. I was okay to stay anywhere, but I live in a house that’s 550 square meters, so a studio apartment for potentially two months might not have been that much fun.”
Despite Lauren getting a pretty bad rap on the show, Clint says she’s actually a lovely person and that they’re still in touch today.
“She definitely had a guard up, wondering if she was going to get humiliated again or be left with undelivered promises that would make her feel uncomfortable. At the end of the day, she’s a good person who was in an environment where she wasn’t comfortable,” he said.
Speaking on why the rest of the brides and grooms turned on them, Clint says it was because “they could see we didn’t want to hang out with them”.
“They thought we were better than them, but that wasn’t the case. We just didn’t enjoy the yelling and raised voices,” he said, noting they just wanted to hang out, drink margaritas and eat oysters.
Same, Clint, same.
In case you haven’t kept up to date with MAFS, let me give you a super zoomy recap. Lauren was initially paired with Eliot Donovan at the beginning of the experiment but that quickly turned to shit within days and he yeeted himself from the show. In a never-before-seen move from the experts, they brought both Lauren and Eliot back with new partners. Enter: Clint Rice and Eliot’s new on-screen wife, Veronica Cloherty.
Although Lauren was jaded from her experience with Eliot, Clint and Lauren attempted to make things work. However, at the Couple’s Retreat, they distanced themselves from the rest of the contestants, with Lauren labelling them as “boganic”. After getting an absolute talking to from expert Mel Shilling, Lauren and Clint acknowledged that they didn’t have a whole lot of chemistry and decided to leave the experiment.
Taking to TikTok, Clint revealed that he has “mixed thoughts” about being matched with Lauren.
“I can see some of the reasons why we were matched together, I think there’s career alignment. Some of our future goals did match up, so I get that,” he said.
“Where I do struggle to understand it is that a lot of our values within the relationship were quite different. For me, I value words of affirmation, empathy and affection. Whereas Lauren values different things, which is fine. We’re all different.
“For me, it was hard to understand why we were matched together in that sense. Having said that, we did get along really well. We had a lot of fun throughout the experiment. We laughed and joked. We did a lot of fun stuff together and supported each other.”
However, thanks to some contract-breaking tea-spilling from fellow contestant Jacqui Burfoot, we now know that Clint and Jacqui ended up falling for each other after meeting on the show.
And now, despite the show still airing, they’ve been sharing all sorts of behind-the-scenes info on their various social media accounts.
You can tune in to Married At First Sight on Nine or 9Now. If you just don’t have the time for four episodes a week, check out PEDESTRIAN vs MAFS, our very own weekly recap of all the best, juiciest bits of the week.
