Do the MAFS women ever shut up?

Thanks to my guilty secret — Married At First Sight — I’m getting insight into the depressing truth about how men see women. And it isn’t pretty, writes Claire Harvey.

I’m feeling very close to heterosexual men right now.

Thanks to my guilty little secret — Married At First Sight — I’m getting my first window into the depressing truth about how they see women. Not because men are sexists, mind.

BECAUSE WOMEN ARE CRAZY.

And we don’t even have the sense to hide the crazy. We talk about it all day long. We just talk. Incessantly. About ourselves. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk… have I ever told you about my tragic childhood… talk, talk… oh, and that bastard Scott and how he had sex with my sister… talk, talk, talk, talk… babe, can you rub some suncream on my neck?… talk, talk, talk… what are you thinking about?… talk, talk… are you listening?… talk, talk… and then she tried to say I was the one starting the argument… talk, talk… oh darl, it’s time to go to the party, can you zip me up?

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Now, I know the women on MAFS are chosen specifically because they are one flavour or another of mentally unwell.

There’s an hysteric, a sad­ist, stage-five clinger, an ­aggressive narcissist, a regular narcissist, a people-pleaser, a compulsive liar, a cruel gossip and, OK, one normal nice lady (the nurturing nursemaid-saint Lauren, who took Matthew’s virginity without one single smirk).

And MAFS is proof, if we ever needed it, that if you have cocktail frankfurts for lips, you are probably a madwoman who is going to end up screaming and crying at some point during a nice night out with friends.

Heidi Latcham and Mike Gunner on Married At First Sight. Picture: Channel 9

I’m serious here. There is a direct correlation between one’s capacity for a normal relationship and the amount of chemicals one has injected into the lips. If you can’t say the phrase: “You didn’t have my back baaaaabe” with your mouth closing at any point, then you don’t deserve a ­husband.

Here’s one nice thing about Married At First Sight: men and women are watching the show together and both, hopefully, are learning something about the oppo­site gender and how relationships work, or don’t.

“See?” the women of Australia are saying, poking their boyfriends in the arm, “see? He isn’t listening to her! She’s trying to tell him how she feels about the fact he left her on their wedding day and went to a fake funeral for his ex-girlfriend’s mother and now he’s gaslighting her!”

And the men of Australia are quietly sitting there taking another row of Top Deck and saying to themselves: “I’m not alone. Thank Christ I’m not alone.”

One of my bloke friends this week said, when I was pondering how much crap the women on MAFS talk about themselves, that if you hope to have sexual relations with a woman, you must ­resign yourself to listening to hours and hours and hours of her talking about her past. “You just have to tune out but look attentive,” he said.

Mike and Heidi having a ‘conversation’ on the beach. Picture: Channel 9

We were discussing the MAFS horror show of a honeymoon where Heidi blathered on and on about herself while Mike, whom she had met (and married) one day earlier, gazed at the horizon and wriggled like a preschooler at mat-time and sighed until eventually he said: “I’m not your therapist. This is not therapy,” whereupon Heidi burst into tears and stormed off in humiliated fury. Mike sat there in confusion and eventually came to the conclusion he was going to have to apologise to make the inexplicable problem go away and stop her from crying.

And that, ladies, is how men see us. Maybe not all the time. But definitely some of the time.

Like it or not, fair or not, we are all talking about the wrong things, for far too long, to the one group of people who have absolutely no ­capacity to get on our level: the men we love.

They don’t want to know about our ex-boyfriends. They don’t particularly care about our abandonment ­issues, and in fact find them actively stressful, because they feel like we’re asking them to solve problems that happened 15 years earlier.

Men, quite rightly, live in terror that every woman’s inner crazy bitch is about to come out at any minute.

So please, women, don’t be Heidi. This is why we all need female friends, who are not only willing, but quite happy to listen to hours of drivel.

And now, I will take my own advice and stop talking about this.