If you were to ask the Married At First Sight experts what makes a good relationship, they’d say words such as loyalty, respect and commitment.

By these markers, the strongest relationship to emerge from 11 seasons of the dating reality show that airs on Nine (the owner of this masthead) is the one Australians have with it.

What did we all do on Valentine’s Day? Well, nearly 1.4 million of us chose to spend it with our most beloved, MAFS, according to VOZ figures, ratings agency OzTAM’s new measurement system.

The Valentine’s Day episode attracted a Total TV national audience of 1.37 million, which means close to 5 per cent of Australia’s population watched MAFS on Wednesday. That’s more people than will see Taylor Swift perform during her Era’s tour here. It’s more people than Benny Blanco has Instagram followers (and he gets Selena!).

So how did we form the most secure attachment of our lives with a show that makes us believe genital cupping is a reasonable form of intimacy? Your other experts – Osman Faruqi, Melanie Kembrey and Thomas Mitchell – are here to talk it out on the latest episode of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald’s pop culture podcast, The Drop.

Like all good therapists, they’ll tell you that what you thought was the problem was only a symptom of something much deeper. MAFS is just the topknot (IYKYK) on Australia’s obsession with reality television.

Cast your mind back to Monday, January 29, when we were all sad the Australian Open was over.

Thankfully, the drama of the tennis was soon replaced by the drama of people singing, surviving and marrying (strangers!).