Married At First Sight’s Awhina Rutene has revealed that she and Adrian Araouzou broke a major production rule before filming Final Vows. Although they seemingly called off their relationship at the final dinner party of the season, the controversial couple appeared in a promo for Sunday night’s episode, confirming that they make it to the end of the experiment.

Speaking with Yahoo Lifestyle ahead of the dramatic season finale, Awhina admits she wishes that she had stayed strong in her position to end the relationship at the dinner party and go their separate ways. Instead, she and Adrian ended up spending the entire week together before Final Vows – something participants are typically encouraged not to do.

“You’re meant to go through a week of separation from each other where you can be one with your emotions so you could enter Final Vows being true to yourself without anyone else’s opinion or perspective. Well, Adrian and I didn’t do that,” she shares.

“We spent that whole week together when you’re meant to be spending time apart, and he actually dropped me off to film my backstory before Final Vows. So I was constantly under Adrian’s influence.”

Awhina says she entered Final Vows ‘with a lot of fear’

Now that it’s been a few months since the show finished filming, Awhina says she’s realised that she was often putting Adrian’s feelings ahead of her own throughout the experiment. She adds that she’s nervous for viewers to watch Final Vows because she wasn’t being her authentic self, but is looking forward to seeing the reunion.

“Final Vows I was not organic to that person. That’s not who I am, I don’t feel true to that person,” she says. “I entered Final Vows with a lot of fear, going, ‘Am I going to be a bad person? Maybe if we just work out, they’re not going to show all the bad moments’. I was constantly instilled with fear.

“The reunion was probably the closest where I felt less filtered in what I could say.”

Why did Awhina and Adrian go to Final Vows?

While viewers have been left baffled by the fact that Awhina and Adrian made it to Final Vows following such a tumultuous journey in the experiment, Awhina hints that the reason why she ended up staying in the experiment was because she was persuaded by production.

“Like always, there are a lot of voices that enter your relationship, a lot of external voices, and we ended up staying,” she says. “I actually said to them [after the dinner party], ‘Look, it makes sense. He said he doesn’t want to go, I don’t want to go, we’re done!’. I wish that was the end.”

Awhina claims she was regularly told during filming that “it wouldn’t make sense” if she quit the show, which is why she hoped that their failed demonstration of loyalty in the Final Test challenge would mark the end of their relationship.

“I felt like I had something tangible to put in front of him like, ‘Maybe we can leave amicably because we both did it, not one or the other needs to be vilified. We both did this challenge because we both don’t believe in this relationship and we have some compatibility issues’,” she explains.

“We didn’t have the same core values, our communication styles were so different, our emotional intelligence was so different, and Adrian was a very selfish person, whereas I wasn’t. It took such a toll on me, that relationship, but I hid behind that challenge because that was something tangible people could see without me attacking Adrian’s character.”