How Are ‘Married at First Sight’ Contestants Chosen?

Dating is hard. With all of the dating apps that pop up, the dating pool has deepened but it doesn’t seem like the fish are becoming any more of a catch. Maybe this is why people are more open to the idea of being married at first sight. Married at First Sight is a reality show that puts individuals through an extensive matchmaking process in order to find their perfect match. The only catch is that once that match is found, the person has to marry them without ever meeting previously.

As viewers, we meet the contestants right before their wedding day, but there is a lot more that goes into finding those perfect matches that we never even see. Here’s how the contestants are chosen for blind matrimony.

The ‘Married at First Sight’ city is chosen

Before the applications are even viewed, the relationship experts and production crew must pick a city for the show to be set in. In order to do this, the crew and experts spend about 6 months in a potential city scouting it out. They have to be sure that the city will work for the show before they begin picking contestants to participate.

While in the city, the crew also goes out to popular places around the city, such as bars and churches to find potential candidates to go on the show. The crew will even go on dating apps to search out local potential matches. Can you imagine swiping right on someone only for them to propose that you marry a stranger at first sight?

The ‘MAFS’ application process

Once the city is chosen, the application process begins. Before the first season of the show, the experts were worried that they would have a hard time finding people to apply for the show.

“We were just hopeful that we would get people to sign up for it,” Chris Coelen, the CEO of Kinetic Content which is the production company behind the show, told E! News of the first season. “We were like, there’s no way people are going to sign up for this, are we even going to be able to make this show because this is insane!”

But since then, people have certainly begun to warm up to the idea of getting married to a total stranger. Each season, the show gets over 50,000 applicants. The team then has to narrow the applications down to 100-200 people that could potentially be a good fit.

The lucky chosen people are then invited to gender-specific workshops. The workshops are set up this way to avoid the potential matches ever seeing each other.

At the workshops, the relationship experts host interview sessions with each of the contestant hopefuls. The applicants must meet with each of the three experts individually and go through psychological evaluations, as well as have their background examined to see if they would be a good match for the show.

Finally, the contestants that do well in the meet and greets are visited by Dr. Pepper Schwartz in their homes.

What it takes to be on the show

So what are Dr. Pepper and the rest of the experts looking for in candidates?

People who listen and are open to coaching.