Can We Get Another Two Hours With Just Vaughn And His Exes?

Where was...the audience?

Say what you will about the recent Couples Therapy reunion -- I certainly did -- but having the couples (and Farrah) peddle their bullshit in front of a studio audience gave the proceedings some energy; the audience reaction forced the show participants to respond in ways that their media trainers probably wouldn't have wanted them to (making for a more interesting show) and spoke for all of us at home. I understand that Married At First Sight is supposed to be a serious "social experiment" and thus a classier affair than anything on VH1, but then again, Couples Therapy is supposed to be about helping real people through their real relationship issues, and The Bachelor is supposed to be about people finding their true mates, and both of those have reunions in front of live audiences. Maybe fyi wasn't confident that it could find a studio's worth of audience members to attend? Or maybe if there were people there, then host Kevin Frazier wouldn't be as confident declaring what "America" loved (Jason and Cortney) or hated (Vaughn's threesome request)? Or maybe Vaughn and Jamie separately said they wouldn't do it in front of a live audience for fear of getting heckled?

In terms of difficulty, The Fire Academy > Harvard, apparently?

I was kind of hoping that Jason would have finished his course at The Fire Academy by the time the show taped so that we could stop hearing about how grueling it is, but NO DICE. Look, I don't doubt that it's very, very hard to complete this training -- without knowing what it even entails, I absolutely grant that I couldn't do it -- but like...it's just school. The description of being in class all day, coming home and studying, and going to bed early describes my experience as an English/Comp. Lit. double major as an undergrad, and you don't hear me whining about it. Sure, I had to spend whole weekends sitting in bed reading Middlemarch rather than running around in punishing New York summer humidity wearing heavy firefighting gear, as I assume Jason does, but I did take some hits to my social life because of my courseload. (I did become the one and only student in my class to finish the novel and you should be able to tell what an accomplishment that is from the fact that I'm still bragging on it twenty-one years later.) Anyway: we get it, Jason. School hard. Despite producers' efforts to make it seem like this might be the issue that broke up Jason and Cortney -- the stress, THE STRESS -- I don't think anyone believed it actually was, and obviously it wasn't. (That said, I was relieved to see Cortney announce that they're not ready to have kids yet. If Jason talked her into that: good job, bro.)

We're still sticking with the whole "really legally married" story?

I've already expressed my doubts that the marriages are real and legally binding, but it comes up again in the reunion when Kevin asks Monet if she's been dating since she and Vaughn split up and she says it's hard when you're married, but that she and Vaughn will be filing for divorce in October, when they will have been separated for the legal minimum of six months. Of course, it could be that Monet was coached to say that, but the specificity makes me think that maybe the marriages really were legally binding? Which makes this whole thing EVEN FUCKING CRAZIER.

Why didn't the still-married dudes get their own solo couch time?

In the case of Jamie and Doug, I get it: he was obviously the more committed partner starting from Minute 1, so he doesn't really have anything to add about how he came to the decision to stay married; it was a decision he came to as soon as he laid eyes on Jamie. But the opposite was true of Jason and Cortney, or so the editing would have had us believe, so why didn't he get to tell his side the way Jamie went on to do later in the episode? I mean, all I wanted to know about Cortney that wasn't already on the show in its initial run was what the deal was with her family and their objections to her participation in the show, and they didn't even really get into them having come around until Jason came out. So I'm chalking this one up to sexism and some bullshitty "happy wife, happy life" subtext.

Can we get another two hours with just Vaughn and his exes?

Since this is my last chance to do it, here's my diagnosis of Vaughn and Monet. Like most normal people, Monet is pretty good at maintaining a pleasant attitude in social situations even if her real emotions are at odds with that exterior. In other words, she's capable of faking it for the sake of avoiding awkwardness with people she doesn't know well, and that's what I think was happening on their honeymoon, since she and Vaughn had seriously JUST MET. But Vaughn strikes me as the kind of person who isn't good at doing that, either because he objects to fake pleasantry on principle, or because he felt that since he and Monet were married/fucking, he could and should be 100% truly himself immediately; when she was being a bit more superficial because she didn't want to drop her social armour yet, he judged her as inauthentic and never really let her do anything that would change that impression for him -- though, to be fair, I think that as soon as he started being weird on their honeymoon, adding that to all the other defects she might have otherwise been willing to overlook (like, whatever it is about his job or financial situation she found objectionable), she might have started writing him off anyway. I think this basic disconnect between their natures -- what he described as her being "bubbly," and how much it bugged him -- is why things didn't work. Sometimes, an outgoing person and a reticent person can click because each of them gives the other what he or she is missing, which I think is something Cortney and Jason said is a reason their marriage has worked; Cortney's description of seeing Jason freaking out at the altar and realizing that she had to toughen up to compensate because they couldn't both freak out resonated with me because -- sorry to be gross for a second -- it's something I've definitely found in my own marriage; everyone gets a chance to lose their shit, but you have to take turns. But with Monet and Vaughn, while they both might have recognized the differences in one another, I doubt that either of them would say that the other balanced him or her in beneficial ways. Vaughn doesn't think there's anything wrong in the way he was very frank with Monet even if he could have been pretty sure telling her some of the shit he did would make her mad; Monet didn't think there was a problem with her continuing to have a social life with her friends when Vaughn was on the record saying that he didn't want to hang out with them.

But ultimately...the problem with this match was Vaughn, because he sucks. He obviously filled out his questionnaire with a very specific idea of the kind of dream girl the experts would provide for him, and when Monet wasn't her, he just got more and more resentful of her. "There's nothing wrong with your hand" is not a sexual come-on one uses on one's partner if one cares if she ever fucks one again AFTER her foot has healed from THE SURGERY SHE JUST HAD ON IT. And THAT is why I need to know whether Vaughn was this bossy, chauvinistic, and sexually demanding in his relationships before this. Furthermore, I submit that talking to applicants' exes should be SOP for future seasons of the show. Even if they have axes to grind, it's worth hearing those stories and letting the applicant respond in order to try to avoid the same dynamic playing out with matches here.

...And a one-on-one with Doug's mom?

Jamie and Doug want us to think everything is cool with her and Doug's Overly Involved Mom. But I want to hear Mom's side of things.

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