Married at First Sight’s Carly need to run away from Troy — now

MARRIED at First Sight’s Carly should run as fast as she can from Troy, whom she was caught with in a park this week.

MARRIED At First Sight has introduced us to a unique guy in Troy this year.

A goofy, innocuous character who brushes his teeth like a maniac, abandons his wife to do push-ups so he doesn’t lose half his body mass before breakfast, and does his inept best to kill every woman within range with a barrage of clumsy flattery.

We’ve looked on incredulously while his bride Ashley — matched with him because his only requirement in a woman is that she look like Barbie crossed with a cheerleader — has kept him around longer than he deserves.

While building furniture, playing tennis and rock climbing, Troy has shown an inability to accept he was being outdone by a woman. He has paid little attention to Ashley’s cues about when physical affection is warranted, and he doesn’t take any of her feedback seriously.

And this week we’ve been stunned that fellow MAFS alum Carly has now been seen letting Troy cop a feel in a Sydney park.

This is not a good idea Carly. Picture: Splash News

I knew a guy like that once. I didn’t take him seriously at first either, but Chris* kept asking me out. He was smart and worldly and, at 17, I was easily impressed.

Chris and I dated for a few months and he treated me like a princess. He sent flowers to my work after our first date, he spent big cash on jewellery and other gifts, he talked about taking me travelling around the world. He told me I was beautiful. This was my first “grown-up” relationship and I was hooked (line and sinker, as it would turn out).

The first thing Chris did once he had me stuck in his affection web was separate me from my family and friends. He was effusive to their faces but when we were alone he’d say my family and friends don’t understand me and that I’ll soon outgrow them.

It’s embarrassing now to admit I fell for it.

Chris said he thought it was cute when I voiced my opinions but he made it clear I was uneducated and didn’t have much to offer. It didn’t matter though, I was very pretty, he said, and he was there to take care of me.

Carolyn says she was pulled in by Chris’s charm, but he took away her confidence.

Then Chris slept with my best friend. He made the pre-emptive strike of telling me about it before she did, and then worked hard to convince me that she’d planned the whole thing, and he’d fallen prey to her trap. He was an idiot, he said, could I forgive him?

I did.

He was good at convincing me, although as an insecure 17-year-old, I was an easy target. Within three months of our first date, my best friend and I had busted up, and I’d had a massive row with my mother that led to me moving out — straight into Chris’s home.

That’s when he really had me, and he went to work eroding my confidence. After a month or two of honeymoon period, Chris started to tell me I’d let myself go. I was looking “homely”. I needed to make more of an effort.

Chris was a DJ, and he’d come home and tell me about the glamorous women that were coming on to him while he spun tunes in nightclubs all over town. He started to pick out my clothes, and tell me where and when I could go out, and with whom.

I became terrified of losing him. “It’s just us against the world, babe,” he’d say to me before leaving me alone for another evening while he went out doing god-knows-what. He wasn’t working nearly as much as he said he was, so he was filling his evenings in other ways.

I found out later was he was still stringing along a fiancee in France, as well as his boss, a colleague of mine he’d met at a Christmas party, and a single-mum friend of ours whom he’d told he wanted to marry and adopt her daughter, but that I was mentally unwell and he didn’t feel like he could abandon me just yet in my fragile state.

He told me these women were crazy and obsessed with him, but he had no idea why.

I lived in this chaotic and tumultuous world for five long years. He’d build me up and tear me down, over and over, and I felt powerless to do anything about it.

We went travelling overseas, which isolated me further. We’d settle somewhere for a few months, then up stumps and move on. There was never a chance for me to form solid friendships.

Carolyn had no control over her own life, with Chris constantly moving them around so she was unable to find people to help her out.

I remember a lovely girl I’d become friendly with in London saying to me, “You don’t have to put up with him, you know. You’re a smart girl. You’ll be all right on your own.”

I cried buckets that night, wishing I had the strength to believe her.

I tried to leave four times but Chris would always weasel his way back in with smooth lines and fanciful excuses. Eventually, though, on the fifth time, I summoned the strength to leave for good.

Chris wrote to me at least once a week for the first six months, telling me he was working out so he could look great for me. Much like Troy and his push ups, he was still seriously missing the point.

What I came to understand is that I had fallen prey to a textbook narcissist. Chris had an excessive sense of self-worth and superiority. He needed to be adored all the time and he had a staggering lack of empathy.

In her book The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists, Eleanor Payson says a narcissist’s “complete self absorption results in an insidious tendency to devalue those within his or her sphere of influence, either subtly with condescension, or openly with criticism”.

“The inevitable impact on the individual in a relationship with [a narcissist] is a dangerous erosion of self-esteem,” she writes.

I’ve come such a long way since Chris, and I’ll never be that foolish again, but I would have saved myself a lot of trouble if I’d taken him seriously when we first met. That’s why Carly would do well to run screaming in the opposite direction from Troy right now.

That clumsy charm and flattery, coupled with those little digs and the inability to accept his wife is better than him at anything — they could just be the producers playing up the buffoon in Troy, but to me — they’re all warning signs. I’d be out of there at record speed.

*Name has been changed.