The Marriage Mechanic

Relationships are like a car, says therapist Stephanie Dowse they need ongoing attention to keep running smoothly. The Kiwicounsellortalks to Emma Clifton about how she came to be an expert on a reality matchmaking show, the keys to finding lasting love - and how to know when its time to call it quits.

- Stephanie Dowse

What’s a nice lady like you doing in a place like this? For more than 20 years, Wellington-based therapist Stephanie Dowse has been working in the trenches of mental health care, covering the full range of human experience from couples counselling and family therapy to working with survivors of sexual assault, trauma and addiction. So what brings her to be the latest professional expert to help matchmake 12 willing strangers in the second series of Married at First Sight New Zealand?

“It was something entirely different to what I had been doing,” she laughs. “I’d been working in that dark side of life for a really long time, so this was an opportunity to pull the best bits of what I do and put them into a really intriguing, fun environment.”

The stakes are a lot lower for the MAFS contestants compared to those Steph has long been working with. “The people who have done [Married at First Sight] have volunteered to be in this experiment, and they can make choices all along the way about what they want to do,” she says. “In a counselling environment, you have people come in who have had terrible things happen to them and it’s been outside of their control – that’s the hard part. Generally in relationships, however, we create our own problems.”