On this last day of a very strange year, I want to honor a special TV show that helped me get through it all. That show is TLC's 90 Day Fiancé.
I had heard of the show a long time ago, but held a misconception about it. I thought that the couples had to be engaged and married within 90 days of meeting each other, and that the women were in some kind of mail-order bride situation. This year, I was delightfully proven wrong.
I am all about other people's drama and was surrounded by it in college. I tried to keep my own personal drama to a minimum and indulge in everyone else's, and my having lots of individual friends outside of a group led to me being a confidant for many people. My bio on the Anthropology Department's peer advisors page even said, "I love gossip." But since leaving college, I have not had as much exposure to the drama of people I knew personally, simply owing to the lack of new people I met and my friends being dispersed all over the world. While trying to become self sufficient and live in housing a far cry from Harvard dorms, I began to understand why people watch reality trash TV. My gateway show into the reality TV world that focused on romantic relationships was Netflix's "Love Is Blind," which was released at the start of the pandemic. The show became enormously popular. As the name implies, it tested the premise of love being "blind" by putting heterosexual men and women in this live-in set where the two groups could not see each other but could only talk through special rooms at certain times. Soon, couples began to form, and six couples left the set engaged. The show continued to follow them all the way to the altar, where some couples' journeys together ended and some said their I do's.
I watched it with two of my best friends from college, and we gleefully dissected the individuals' personalities and the flaws they exhibited in their relationships. As fun as this was, I couldn't help but wish that there were some kind of international version of Love Is Blind, one where the participants weren't all just people living in the Atlanta metro area where the set was based. This wish stems from my already well-documented desire to get to know people from other places, and also the fact that I am especially boy crazy over hot foreigners.
Somehow, I'm not quite sure why, James and I started watching 90 Day Fiancé on Hulu soon after I finished watching Love Is Blind. I realized then that 90 Day Fiancé was not about mail order brides–rather, it's about different couples with different stories as to how they got together, and every couple is made up of an American and somebody from another country. The name 90 Day Fiancé refers to the K1 visa, through which the foreigners have 90 days upon arrival in the USA to get married to their American partner. Each season of the show follows six (or so) couples in their journeys, describing how they met and fell in love, and then the challenges they face once the foreigner arrives in the USA. Besides the traditional 90 Day Fiancé, there are also two spinoff shows I watch: Before the 90 Days, in which Americans who fall in love with foreigners they've never met meet them for the first time abroad, and The Other Way, in which Americans who fall in love with foreigners plan to move abroad to be with their partners.
Personally, I prefer the two spinoffs because the bulk of the episodes takes place in the other countries where the Americans' partners are from, though I am still a huge fan of the original series. All of them have elements I love: other people's drama, scenes of everyday life in other countries, and even interviews of the foreigners' friends speaking in their native languages. In a year where I couldn't travel outside of the country (besides my lucky trips to the Philippines and Guatemala in January and February), the show unexpectedly satisfied needs I didn't think I would ever be this unable to meet.
Beyond these reality TV qualities, the show in its own way also provides a commentary on how absurd the American immigration system is. Time and again, every couple says that 90 days is not enough time for the foreigner to get settled and for the couple to experience living their American life together before getting married. A major pain point is that the foreigners can't work until they get residency, which often doesn't happen for months after they get married so they are often left at home, bored and without friends, completely dependent on their American partners. The foreigners also have to go through a harrowing visa interview process, which supposedly is to weed out people who are in fake relationships from getting to the US (not that I personally have a problem with that, since I believe borders are fake colonial constructs), but which denies many sincere couples a visa anyway. In an ideal world, people would be free to move around for love without having to worry about bureaucracy. While many of the couples on the show are completely dysfunctional and in unhealthy relationships, there are many long-distance couples in real life who are kept apart by unnecessary visa measures.
Another thing I love to hate seeing on the show is how obnoxious so many Americans are. A recurring line, which I abhor, is "Why can't you meet someone in this country?" It really perfectly demonstrates their lack of open-mindedness and acknowledgment of the world outside of the USA, and the possibility that your ideal partner might not live anywhere near you. Even if I can sympathize with the skepticism of the families of Americans who plan on marrying someone they've never met, I cannot sympathize with their being completely unwelcoming to the foreigners when they do arrive. In a weird way, knowing that so many Americans really are this terrible, it motivates me to keep being the way I am, welcoming to people no matter where they might come from, and curious about the places they left behind.
All that aside, the show became a staple to our days spent in quarantine. Because we watched the series on Hulu and not on TLC/cable TV when every new episode aired, we had multiple seasons available to us right away. Thus, watching an episode over dinner became a nightly ritual for us, something to look forward to. When I took up the counter space where we would eat our meals with my office equipment before I got a desk, we would sit on our futon, prop my laptop on the ottoman, and feel like we were having a real TV dinner with a show. We felt like we got to know the cast of each season in the way people know reality TV stars, and their antics enlivened our daily conversations.
This was all a very general overview of a show I could say so much about. While I would love to wax poetic about specific couples and certain dynamics and themes that recur throughout the show, I may save that for another time. For now, I am eagerly waiting for 2021 to bring me drama of people I know personally and actual everyday moments in foreign places.
But just in case neither of those outcomes somehow become true, I know where to turn!
P.S. Here's one 90 Day meme of many that have brought me enjoyment, just for the sake of this post having an image.
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