The 66 percent success rate remains! During the season finale for Married at First Sight‘s second season, two couples — Jaclyn Methuen + Ryan Ranellone and Jessica Castro + Ryan De Nino — decided to stay together.
The experiment didn’t go quite as well for Davina Kullar and Sean Varricchio. After the finale revealed (or, rather, confirmed) they were getting divorced, Davina and Sean were finally free to speak out about the experience. And that they did!
“I don’t think the real Sean, the genuine Sean, ever really showed up. I can’t say that I really know who I was married to,” Davina told Page Six this week. “I didn’t have a connection at all with him.”
Despite a hot start on their wedding night, Davina and Sean struggled to connect on deeper levels throughout the show. They turned out to be the only couple that didn’t consummate the marriage. Making matters worse, neither were truly willing or able to relocate in order to live closer. Their fate was all but sealed when Sean revealed in the penultimate episode that he already accepted a promotion back in New Jersey, even though they lived together in Manhattan.
Sean also spoke to Page Six, and said he thinks Davina should share the blame for the relocation issue.
“I’m willing to compromise on so many things as long as someone’s willing to compromise a little bit with me and I didn’t feel that at times,” he said, explaining they rarely stayed together during the final three weeks. “She came to Jersey a total of three or four times. She didn’t appear to be all that comfortable being here, but I wasn’t all that comfortable in Manhattan.”
Before “decision day,” Davina and Sean agreed to divorce. Still, their meeting with the experts took a turn for the worse when Sean called Davina egocentric.
“I had never said that. I had maybe danced around my words with her and never been as direct as I could have been because I really tried to see things from her point of view,” he said, explaining he always felt like he was “walking on eggshells” around her. “[On decision day] I had a chance to say what I wanted to say.”
Davina said she was shocked by Sean’s anger:
At decision day, we had a friendship going into that and he really blindsided me with some really negative comments. It makes it difficult to have a friendship because a friendship is based on trust, based on components of character, and those were unfortunately laid to the side.
After telling the experts their verdict, Sean and Davina had to come back together to move out from their shared apartment, and, later, to film a six-month reunion special. Besides those two meetings, they said they’ve had absolutely no contact with each other. As Sean put it, “I would describe the relationship between her and I right now to be pretty non-existent.”
