John Aiken says MAFS 2026 has a girl gang who 'come for the men': 'Screaming matches'

Relationship expert John Aiken has teased that Married At First Sight (MAFS) 2026 is set to deliver next-level drama, telling Chattr that there’s a group of women on the upcoming season who create chaos.

John said that the show’s huge success largely comes down to the dynamic personalities cast on the show.

“They’re what makes or breaks the experiment. And so this year, what’s different, particularly and how it’s evolved, is that we have a group of women, about six of them, who band together and call themselves the boss babes, and they decide to dominate and overpower the experiments,” he told Chattr.

“They come for the men, they come for the women, and they come for the experts. And what that means is it makes relationships very difficult. It makes friendships in the experiment very challenging, and there’s walkouts, there’s screaming matches,” he added.

John explained that when they initially cast this group of participants, they had no idea that this group of women would join forces.

“That’s one of the great things about the show, is that it’s unscripted. When we put them together, we know them to a certain degree, but really, after about two weeks, their real selves start to come out.

“And in this situation, we knew we had empowered women, but we didn’t know that they would then become incredibly domineering and at times, really hurtful, with some of their words and actions.”

John Aiken says there were times the experts considered removing the women from MAFS

John explained that the bold women will be one of the main storylines throughout the season, and told Chattr that there were times when the experts considered sending them home over their actions.

“We’ve certainly got the most outspoken women, I think, that we’ve ever had on the show, and some of the language that gets used is very, very confronting,” he said.

“There were times when the language, you know, got pretty blunt and full on. And, you know, we thought about, just when is it too far?”

John added that MAFS producers took their duty of care very seriously, and some of the participants worked with psychologists behind the scenes.

“Duty of care is very, very important to us. So they’ve got psychologists on set that they have access to before, during and after the experiment. They get social media training, and they’ve got production with them every day. So we were across all of it, and so we didn’t need to expel anybody from the experiment at all.”