“A Beautiful Love Story”: MAFS’ Lucinda On Her Relationship Breakthrough With Tim — & What’s Next

Since Lucinda Light hit our screens on this season of Married At First Sight Australia, people have fallen in love with her. Her husband Timothy Smith, however, has had more of a rocky journey.

After grappling with the loss of his entire family, including his father only six weeks before the experiment began, Tim has lived up to his 'Tin Man' reputation, refusing to let Lucinda in.

But in episode 22 of MAFS, we watched on as the Tin Man finally broke down crying, eventually coming to his wife for comfort — seemingly a first in the show so far. The breakthrough has been a long time coming, and while audiences weren't even sure if he would get there with Lucinda, she doesn't harbour that same cynicism.

"It really took me a while to understand the layers of Tim's grief and what he needed and how he unpacks and what's not an irritant to him," Lucinda tells Refinery29 Australia. "I'm somebody that just wants to delve into it all and speak about feelings all day long, but that's not Tim's approach."

Since their wedding, Lucinda has been trying to dig deep with Timothy, only to be met with a hard wall. For her, she's had to balance between prying in and getting him to open up, knowing when not to push, and even when to advocate for her own needs. "Tim had complex grief on there," Lucinda explains. "It was a bit of a dance between doing the relationship stuff and holding that deeply, that part of himself."

For Lucinda, she's been aware since day-dot that she couldn't put her own way of doing things on Tim in fear that he might freeze up. "I'm somebody that just wants to delve into it all and speak about feelings all day long, but that's not Tim's approach," she says. "He keeps it really real, but he's not somebody that generally likes to unpack or share his feelings and emotions."

Lucinda explains that despite knowing that they both had very different communication styles (and ways of dealing with their emotions), it took her a while to really, truly understand him. "It took me a while... to understand that complexity and his internal scape," she explains. "It was a moment by moment, day by day discovery and inquiry."

But despite winning Australia's hearts, it seems that Lucinda still feels as if she could have done better when it comes to her relationship with Tim. "Many times... I wasn't tuning in, I wasn't reading the room enough," she says. "There's so much in retrospect that I would have done if I had known better. When you know better, you do better."

It seems that during episode 22, we finally saw this come to fruition, with Timothy finally confiding in Lucinda, giving her a long, lengthy hug, and calling her his "rock". For Lucinda, this is all she wanted. "I was genuinely doing my best to be compassionate and understand him and be gentle, but also get the marriage moving and move it in a direction that gave it a shot."

The moment is proof that when it comes to dealing with grief, everyone handles it completely differently. Tim has said time and time again that he is a "slow burn", but at the end of the day, he just needed definitive proof that Lucinda was there for him and willing to fight for him.

While many of us might have been understandably sceptical about Lucinda and Timothy to start with, it seems that as each episode flies by, our hearts are steadily defrosting to the genuine connection that these two have. "It's a beautiful love story that unravels," Lucinda hints. "It'll touch your heart immensely."

By the sounds of it, we might just be at the part of the season where Tim and Lucinda's 'story' gets the highly valued 'love' attached to it, and if you ask me, it might be just one of the most genuine love stories that'll unravel this season.