Random Behind-The-Scenes Facts From 'Married At First Sight' (13 items)

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  (#9) Couples In The Same Season Have Never Spent Time Together

  The show's format allows for each couple to live in a different city, meaning they don't have a chance to interact with each other prior to taping. Series producer Chris Coelen said this was a strategic move, as otherwise making the couples meet up and spend time with each other would be perceived as "fake." Coelen continued: 

  It’s not that we don’t want them to [meet the other couples in the show]. If they did, they do. We just want it to be real. We don’t set anything up, really. It would be a lot easier from a production standpoint if we said, ‘Why don’t you all move here? Why don’t you all come to LA?
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  (#11) Lots Of People Left Casting When They Found Out They'd Have To Get Married

  Producers' decision not to tell potential participants about the show's biggest twist proved risky. Executive producer Chris Coelen revealed around half the people who showed up for casting decided to opt out when they learned there'd be a wedding involved. Coelen elaborated: 

  About half said they didn’t want to [do] it... It was really scary as a producer; we didn’t know that we were going to get people who would agree to do the show. We thought we might come out of these workshops with nobody - with nobody agreeing to do it, let alone people we thought we could match.

  Finding the right people for the show was crucial, Coelen added, "because what we wanted to accomplish with the show was real, was genuine, we wanted to be successful, that was the motivation to do the show."
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  (#4) Some People Have Serious Regrets

  Some cast member revealed they had pretty significant regrets while filming, including Nick Pendergrast, who told The Knot he felt terrible about how he handled himself during a fight with his wife that made it onto the show. 

  "I could only imagine how she must have felt," Pendergrast said of his wife, who was not aware of just how upset he was during the argument in question until the day that the episode aired. The fight, which had to do with attraction, prompted Sonia Granados to defend her husband on social media and implore people to refrain from criticizing him. Pendergrast continued: 

  It was a hard week for sure, and I tried to stay away from social media and focus on other things to distract myself from being sucked into reading comment after comment... 

  I now entertain social media in a different light for sure! Not everyone is going to like you or view you how you want them to. I kept to the theme of wanting to be authentic, though, and the tweets, Instagram posts, etc. are really me and my thoughts and photos portraying my mood in that moment.
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  (#6) The Show Helps To Pay For Divorce

  As it turns out, the show helps cover the cost of divorce if a couple decides not to stay married over the six-week course of the show. It's not exactly cut and dry however, and there are certain rules that dictate just how involved the show's executives are in the divorce process.

  "There is not any money specifically built in for divorce costs," producer Chris Coelen revealed in an interview. "We will contribute within a certain period of time if they get divorced. We will help them cover the costs of an attorney if they choose to do that. I don’t know what the amount is. It’s nominal."

   
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  (#10) Producers Didn't Tell People What They Were Signing Up For

  According to executive producer Chris Coelen, he and the other producers withheld the twist of the show from potential cast members who showed up to be part of it. According to Coelen, there was a good reason to keep things secret: 

  We wanted to make sure people were brave and bold. They would probably get a lot of people telling them not to do it. We wanted people who felt confident enough and independent enough that they would choose to go through with it.

   When participants finally learned about the twist, their reaction were extremely mixed:

  People were stunned by that. Some people got angry, some people laughed, some people were just dumbfounded... We had to tell them why we did the casting this way. We thought if we told people, from the beginning... the the kinds of people who we would attract are people, as they would say on The Bachelor, are in it for the wrong reasons.
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  (#13) Most Of The Show Is Extremely Real

  Vaughn, one of the husbands from the show's first season, revealed in a Facebook post that although some of what happened was taken out of context, the majority of what happens is real.

  "Dinner scene and very few things were ever ‘staged,'" he said of the time he spent with his wife, Monet. 

  Courtney, a first-season bride, agreed with the assessment and said she was grateful the show did a good job of portraying what was really happening throughout the bizarre process:

  One of the good things about everything with me and Jason and our relationship is we were real the entire time... There were a lot of conversations that we had on camera for the first time ever, and there were a lot of times where we would say 'real talk.' Whenever we said 'real talk' that was like our code to our production [team] that this was the first time we were ever having this conversation.

   

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