Courtesy of Lifetime
This is it! Or so we think.
And by “it,” we mean that we’ve likely seen the last of Married at First Sight‘s Tristan Thompson and Mia Bally together, being as dysfunctional as possible on national television. They went out with a bang during last night’s “I Still Do?” finale.
While we knew that the couple didn’t stay together, and that it was Mia who seemed to get the ball rolling on the divorce by filing (more on that in a bit), we never knew what spurred her decision to do so. During the finale, it came out that an encounter with one of Tristan’s exes set things off. Ok, to be clear, it was just a picture of the girl that created the drama, but Tristan said it was enough to make her walk out yet again, and a day after they filmed the Decision Day episode.
“I was scrolling on my Facebook and I just see a random video of my ex and then that really set her off and she was like, ‘Well you care about her,'” he said. “Where did you get that from? I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ Why can’t you just be secure that you’re here with me, I chose you. I just chose you. And I said, ‘I can’t keep doing this. You have to get mentally tougher.’ About 30 seconds later she had her purse over her and she said, ‘Well you don’t have to be mean about it,’ and she stormed out.”
But Mia, who got to speak on the incident separately, had a completely different story (as usual) that ended with Tristan’s mom also letting her know she needed to toughen up.
“The moment filming ended, the very next day, Tristan was showing me pictures of his ex-girlfriend. He was like, check out my ex-girlfriend. She was in a bikini, a lot is showing and he was like, ‘She’s so beautiful.’ Like talking her up basically,” she said. “I was like, ‘I’m sitting right here.’ And then he said I was not mentally strong or mentally tough, and that’s when I removed myself from that situation because I had honestly no idea how to handle it. And then three days later his mom called me and she just expressed that Tristan has tons of women that come up to him and hit on him and that I just need to be more secure with myself to handle those types of things. And for me I was just like, why didn’t Tristan call me? Why didn’t he reach out to me?”
When the former couple reunited to sit super far apart on the couch together in front of the experts, things went left because neither party could agree on who initiated the idea of divorcing. Tristan said he did because he “could not bet my future on an unstable woman,” and Mia said she did it because the situation involving Tristan’s ex was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
“After the ex-girlfriend incident, I initiated the divorce,” she said after Tristan claimed he introduced the idea. “Can you please be honest and tell them we were supposed to go to counseling in Houston? I made the trip to Houston and then you said that you wanted a divorce. I originally said I wanted the divorce and then the counseling he initiated, and then I was the one who filed. That’s what happened.”
The only silver lining to that whole mess of an ending between them is the fact that Mia admitted she has some work she needs to do on herself, and that getting married at first sight probably wasn’t the best idea. Of course, she found a way to “Mia up” that moment.
“I have a lot of self-work I need to do. Like a lot of self-love, a lot of healing. And just a lot of things I didn’t know about marriage going into this,” she said. “I really thought it was fairy tales and rainbows and then actually going into it it was like, ‘No, a part of my innocence was almost taken from me.’ It’s like a little bit, not a little bit, it’s a lot a bit harder than what I thought it would be.”
But Tristan, well, he didn’t admit to any shortcomings, nor did he apologize for the comments he made early in the season that were deemed colorist. Instead, he broke down in tears over the way he felt he was falsely characterized.
“Based off a five-second clip, you had thousands of people judging me and attacking my family,” he said. “I’m not a colorist. I’m not a racist. I don’t hate myself. I do not hate my family. I love my family [cries].”
One might feel bad for him if it weren’t for the fact that his comment about not wanting to date anyone darker than him literally wasn’t edited whatsoever. The world is just going off of what specifically came out of his mouth — so there’s that.
But Tristan’s tears weren’t the final word in the Tristan and Mia saga. Mia actually took to her Instagram page soon after the finale aired to make it clear that she believes “Real men don’t demoralize women” in the way that she felt Tristan did her:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BpTEObYHrpf/?hl=en&taken-by=miabally1
Yeah, we’re not going to miss these two, but we wish them well. As for the folks on Twitter, they feel the same way — just in a much stronger way. Check out the response to Tristan and Mia’s divorce announcement, and final thoughts on their troubled and short-lived marriage.
