Fans have been wondering why Awhina Rutene has stayed on Married At First Sight (MAFS) 2025 for so long, when her relationship with Adrian Araozou has been anything but perfect. During the final Dinner Party, Adrian bluntly told Awhina he didn’t see any reason to go to Final Vows, leaving Awhina in tears (once again).
She tells Chattr she actually wanted to leave early on in the experiment but pushed her feelings aside because she was “scared of retaliation”, which is sad to hear.
“I was shut down quite strongly by even the group, you know, I would say like, ‘I don’t feel like Adrian and I are compatible’ in the first few weeks and I wanted to go home. [But] because there’s grooms like Tim [Gromie], Eliot [Donovan] and Jake [Luik] not giving a chance and leaving early, the language from the group was quite strong against me,” she recalls.
“[The group would say] like, ‘this is unfair to Adrian. You’re robbing Adrian of his opportunity. Adrian here, he’s showing up. You know, give him a chance’,” Awhina says.
Although Adrian has displayed some pretty controversial behaviour — like at Family and Friends week — Awhina claims she started to doubt herself and believe she may be “the bad guy” in the situation, after so much pushback from Adrian and the group.
“I was made to feel like the villain and there was a lot of fear festering when walking into those Dinner Parties when you had this group environment, and you were scrutinised,” she explains.
“[Adrian would also] constantly attack me and my character, so I was left reeling going, ‘Am I the bad guy? Why are you painting a false narrative about me?’”
Awhina’s attitude seemed to completely change after Family and Friends week, and while most fans expected her to leave, she ended up becoming docile and amicable with her husband. She says she did this on purpose, as she was trying to “survive”.
“When I chose to stay when I did, I was like, you know what? I’m not staying to argue with someone every day. I’m gonna reset and essentially brush all my needs and wants under the rug. And I was like, I’m going to try and live in the now, in the moment, and in the lighter times. Because arguing all the time was really unhealthy for me,” she explains.
Awhina tried to convince Adrian to leave MAFS with her ‘amicably’
The bride says she tried to convince Adrian to leave MAFS with her “amicably” off camera, but she believes he wanted to stay for fame.
Seeing as Awhina had to leave her son behind in Perth for eight weeks, she said it was “disappointing” to stick around for a match that didn’t seem to want to make an effort.
She tells us about a conversation where she asked him to “leave amicably together”, where they told the cameras they weren’t compatible.
“He’d be like, ‘Oh, I’m giving up a lot to be here too’,” she says. “Like, you know, ‘Maybe give this experiment a shot’. It was always pushed back on me.”
Poor Awhina. She’s definitely been through a lot, and it makes more sense why she ended up sticking around.
Married At First Sight 2025 airs Sundays at 7pm and Monday – Wednesday at 7:30pm on Channel 9 and 9Now.
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