Here’s the shocking reason one of the original MAFS experts was forced to quit the show

During the first seven seasons of MAFS Australia, there was actually another expert who ultimately decided she had to quit the show for ethical reasons.

Dr Trisha Stratford join MAFS Australia in 2015 during the very first season alongside John Aiken and left after five years in 2020, describing the show as something like a warzone.

The expert revealed that she felt like she was “compromising” her “personal and professional standards” by being on the show, mainly due to the type of cast members that were joining.

She told the NZ Herald: “I thought I had very strong resilience after everything I’ve done in my life, but MAFS took me to another level.

“run workshops on resilience here and in Australia, talking about things like conflict in war zones. Now I bring MAFS into it because it was a tough gig psychologically.”

She continued: “By the end, I couldn’t compromise my professional and personal standards because there were participants on the show who I felt shouldn’t have been there.

“If someone gets through the critical selection process when we say we don’t want them on the show because they’re quite fragile psychologically, they’re not going to do well during or after the show.”

Trisha explained that MAFS Australia was originally more of an observational documentary where the experts were testing “psychological and scientific theories of attraction.”

However, she felt as though the ethos of the show changed, recalling: “Then it got supersized, a bit like MasterChef, into what we know as MAFS now. The participants we got in seasons six and seven were so outrageous and outside the norm that it wasn’t what I signed up for.”

She continued: “People watch in the millions – it’s the highest-rating show in Australia – so it was a big call to leave. But did people watch the last two seasons to learn about relationships or to see people being outrageous?

Ultimately Trisha felt as though the people who applied to be on MAFS Australia weren’t really genuine, and that it got to the point where watching the dinner parties made her feel “sick.”

She added: “Big egos became the norm. We got participants who came on the show to boost their Instagram numbers. MAFS gives you permission to act out your shadow side, but there were no boundaries with those participants.

“At a couple of those dinner parties, I felt sick. I felt in my guts that this wasn’t what I’d want to be watching at home on TV.”

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