90 Day Fiance and Me - A Personal History
Hi Gems, Liza here.
Did that title come across as facetious? Because it was VERY much intended that way.
Okay you guessed it, I’m going to talk about my complicated on-again-off-again relationship with the landmark TLC television program 90 Day Fiance.
Every couple of years I will feel overwhelmed, exhausted, or depressed and I’ll dip into one of the 90 Day Fiance franchise series. If you haven’t seen it before, this show features Americans who are engaged to foreigners, in some cases people they have met only once or twice. The foreign fiances apply for a visa that gives them 90 days to get married from the moment they land in the US.
Here’s the thing: watching it doesn’t feel great. It feels voyeuristic all the time. It feels problematic some of the time. It often features extremely lonely people. It often features people who are desperately trying to escape poverty. It shows a lot of misguided American exceptionalism. It shows a lot of relationships with massive power differentials. Often when I have it on, and Jeff walks by and catches some of it, he will say “how do you watch this?” He’s not judging my TV consumption, he just believes, and I quote “it is the saddest show I’ve ever seen.”
So….how do I watch this show? Or I guess...why do I watch this show? The reason I keep coming back to is that I believe it is a very, very fascinating exploration of the dynamics of romantic relationships. But to me, 90 Day Fiance is the anti-romcom, the anti-Bachelor. It’s the opposite of idealized love propaganda. It’s about un-glamourously trying to make a partnership work - personality flaws, baggage, mixed families, different needs and expectations, money problems, cultural and religious differences - they all have to be navigated. And it’s often people who barely know each other. It’s in some strange way a version of what our podcast tries to do - explore early stages of dating. The snap judgments, the quick decisions, the constant reading of the barometer of whether or not you’re feeling each other.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s above all else a reality show. There’s some janky ass editing meant to amp up drama and remove nuance. There’s some people who are truly deplorable. There are some people who will always be performing for the camera or trying to garner instagram follows. But I genuinely believe that the vast majority of people on this show want to connect with another human and find a partner that will help them build the life that they would like to build for themselves.
And it’s that idea of what kind of life people want to build that makes this show so different from most content about love and romance. It’s pragmatic. A lot of times, the things people want are very discomforting. Often a younger, more attractive foreign person dates an older, wealthier American (gender wise, this actually splits both ways on the show, although slightly more often than not it is a younger, more attractive woman with an older, wealthier man). Often it means someone from a very poor country wants to come to live in America where they feel they will have more opportunities (for themselves and their children), and it’s not so much about finding a soul mate. A lot of times the Americans are recovering from divorce and want their next partner to be more appreciative of them.
These specific wants are sometimes extremely sad and hard to watch. But I also think they show a very real aspect of dating and looking for a partner - that we are often trying to complete the story we’ve written for ourselves. 90 Day Fiance is an extremely heightened example, but it shows the part of dating that almost no other TV show or movie about love and romance does: the completely fucking non-romantic side of it.
Okay now for the segment that got me philosophically thinking about a goddamn TLC show...
Consumption Corner:
The Wedding Coach with Jamie Lee
90 Day Fiancé - duh.