MAFS' Selina spills on what really happened when Cody brutally dumped her

All of Australia followed Selina Chhaur’s journey to find love on this year’s season of Married At First Sight, which came to an end earlier this week when her TV husband Cody Bromley made the shock announcement that he had decided to break up with her at the reunion.

Since then, viewers have been left with plenty of questions about why he abruptly ended things between filming the dinner party and sitting down with the experts, what went down after the cameras stopped rolling, and what their relationship looks like now.

Speaking exclusively with Yahoo Lifestyle, Selina pours her heart out and reveals what really happened in the breakdown of their ‘marriage’ that fans never got to see on TV.

The Final Vows

Prior to making their decision to stay together at the Final Vows, Selina says that Cody was “love bombing” her by constantly calling and texting during the brief time they spent apart in the experiment.

“For Cody and our relationship, that’s a lot. I thought, wow, maybe long distance can actually benefit us because we're not in each other's face all the time and he's got the time to do his thing, I've got the time to do my thing,” she describes.

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“And then obviously we said we'd both commit after Final Vows and then after that, he made the plans to have me spend Christmas with his family and meet his 94-year-old grandma.

“I just thought, wow, this is it. We spent so much time with his friends and his family over December. And then all of a sudden he was the one that said, ‘Look, leading up to reunion now I really want to start making plans for the future’. I was like, wow, this is massive for Cody.”

The Reunion

Selina explains that she and Cody had decided that she would move from her home in Adelaide into his mum’s house in Sydney at the end of April when she had completed her work commitments, however, everything changed at the reunion.

“I thought everything was fine,” she continues. “I spent time at his house and everything was chill, but he was a little bit standoffish when the crew came in. And I was like, ‘Oh no, not this again’.

“And the producer obviously wanted to portray like, ‘You are together now guys, come on. How about Cody, get up and give her a kiss’ and he just kept making narky comments, and that was gut-wrenching. Like, why are you acting like this?

“I let that go, like maybe I'm just reading too much into things. We went to the dinner, walked in and obviously he grabbed my hand then, which I noticed is a pattern. He seems to always show affection or some kind of physical touch when there are other people around.”

Although things went well at the start of the night when the couple excitedly shared their plans with the group that they were moving in together, things took a turn at the dinner table.

“I noticed during dinner that he just kept literally like, blocking me out with his arms. Normally you’d have your arm on the chair around your partner, but he was just very standoffish. I've never had to initiate any form of physical touch or intimacy ever, and I just felt weird. I was trying to nestle my way in, but the more I was doing that the more he was trying to block me.”

The Car Ride Home

The situation went from bad to worse for Selina and Cody when they were in the car after filming had wrapped on the dinner party.

“There were no cameras around, so I went and placed my hand on his to say like, ‘Hey, you good?’,” she details. “And then he just had this weird knee jerk reaction and made a really not nice sound.

“I was a bit like, ‘Is everything okay? Is it that bad holding my hand? I’m so confused. We’re a couple, we’re planning on moving in together’. And he said, ‘I just don’t want to!’, and he yelled at me, and he doesn’t normally do that.

“He just goes hot and cold and I'm constantly having to walk on eggshells and gauge, am I going to get nice, affectionate Cody today? Or am I going to get cold Cody? And I just felt like, I could never step out of line because if I did, he would give me the cold shoulder.

“He would flick it on me if I ever were to bring it up and say, ‘This is how I'm feeling’. He would be like, ‘Well I could say the same about you!’. It’s just gaslighting. It was always my fault.”

The Break-Up

Following the incredibly awkward tension in the car, Cody made the surprise announcement that he wanted to end things then and there.

“So basically, I asked him if it was that bad holding my hand and he said, ‘Yeah I just don’t want to’. And then typical Cody, just out of nowhere, he goes, ‘Yeah so, like, I’m just gonna call it. Yeah’,” she recalls.

“I’m like, ‘What?’. Meanwhile, we’d been filming for like 12-15 hours now, it was now sunrise so I was a little bit rattled like, ‘Wait, what's going on? What did you just say? What do you mean you're calling it? Calling what?’. And he's like, ‘Yeah, I've decided we’re just going to break up. I'm ending it’. Just like that.

“Of course, typical me, I internalise that and I took it as if I did something wrong. So then I was like, what have I done? Is there anything I can do? Did I say something? Did I do something? And it’s awful now thinking back, I can't believe I did that. The whole time I felt like I was going crazy, I was the problem. But that's what people like Cody do, it's so toxic.”

The Aftermath

Selina says that she “never really got closure” from their break-up and to this day she doesn’t know exactly why Cody decided to call it quits.

“There was this whole back and forth conversation and he ended it saying like, ‘Look, if we're meant to be we’ll find our way back to each other’,” she remarks. “Again, you're trying to give me false hope when you know inside that this isn’t going to go anywhere.

“One of the last things he said to me was, ‘I don't like you because you're a people pleaser, and you remind me too much of my mum and that puts me on edge’.

“And then he requested to have two weeks of no contact and he said, ‘I’ll call you the day of the first episode airing'. And then that conversation lasted for three hours and it was the same, it was Cody going around in circles.”

The Adelaide Trip

During their lengthy phone call, Cody told Selina that he was going to be in Adelaide in two weeks and wanted to see her.

“I just said, 'Look Cody, if you've got something to say, or something's changed, I'm happy to see you. Otherwise, I just don't think it's good to see each other’,” she details, adding that she told him she was happy to do interviews together but didn’t want to stay in contact.

“And then he was like, ‘Oh well yeah, I've got nothing to say. Nothing's changed at all. I was just letting you know I was in town. But I’ll always have the time for you though because you know how much I care about you’.

“Then I find out that he's gone and gotten the paparazzi to follow him around Adelaide and get pap shots. So I'm like, you’ve just shown me your true colours.

“You could have had a chance to catch up with me behind closed doors to make things right but instead, you've gone out in your little pink budgie smugglers to my local beach, which you used to pay out all the time because ‘it's nothing compared to the Northern Beaches’ and get pap photos and send out articles. Oh, 'Cody Bromley in Adelaide on Valentine's Day. Where's his bride?’. Like, what were you trying to do with that?”

The Edit

While viewers were often left stunned by Cody’s actions in the experiment, including when he admitted to Selina that he wasn’t attracted to her because of her race or when he told Domenica at the dinner party that everyone had seen a photo of her naked, Selina believes that he had a completely different perspective of how he would be portrayed on the show.

“It makes sense in his head that he’s ‘a nice, true blue Aussie guy, just a larrikin, one of the boys’,” she shares.

“He thought he was going to come across just your happy go lucky guy and everything was just fun and banter, but it wasn’t. You treated me like a second-grade citizen. What he did and what he was saying was just so wrong and just disrespectful.

“Honestly, I feel like he faked [the relationship] and it got to the point where you can't fake it anymore, and even just the thought of me holding his hand was just like, ‘Ew’. He was done.

“And also, at homestays I did find out that he only applied for the show because he lost a bet at the gym with one of the boys.”

The Feelings

Now that the show has finished airing and Selina has re-lived everything that happened between her and Cody, she asserts that she “can confidently say there are no more feelings there”.

“I think I'm the type of person that when I care about someone and when you're in my tribe, I will always give my all to you and I will always see the best in you. So that's what I did with Cody. I kind of blocked out all the negatives,” she adds.

“So watching that whole season I was like, wow. I really needed to see that to really see my worth and how poorly he treated me. Like, no one's cat even deserves to be treated the way that Cody treated me.

“But I'm so humbled and grateful for everyone's support. Everywhere I've gone everyone's just been so kind and it means a lot.”

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