From The Holiday to 90 Day Fiancé

What’s the perfect formula when deciding what to watch next? If you’re a viewer like me, you want programming that’s going to offer you an escape from your everyday dwelling, allow you to blurt out solutions to other people’s silly problems, and results in making your life seem put together and better off than others.

This is how I felt when I first watched a movie called The Holiday. It’s a romantic comedy about unrequited love with the twist of having to swap lives with a complete stranger from the other side of the world.

We’ve heard of Air B&B where you rent someone else’s home for a vacation, but you don’t get to use their car and have to let them stay at your home while you’re away. You don’t engage in relations with their family and friends and let that develop into happily ever after. Or do you?

As hopeless romantics, we long for the day when we’re going to meet our other half. We wonder what they’ll look like. But of course, they’re going to look like the handsome leading man or the gorgeous skinny heroine.

We just know we’re going to be in an amazing relationship with them that develops with ease and leaves us confident that we’re making the right decision. Our union is so perfect and fulfills the promise behind every fairytale that’s ever been told because this is the person with whom we’re meant to spend the rest of our life.

And when a movie like The Holiday comes along perfectly mirroring our imagination, we just know true love is out there and it’s just a matter of time before it finds us next. When we step out of our comfort zone and embark on this adventure, rest assured we’re going to be in a world where everyone is rich and successful, everyone lives in million-dollar estates in Malibu, CA or quaint English cottages in Surrey.

We’re going to instantly meet the one that completes us and fall head over heals in ever lasting love together. And life, well we don’t know how life turns out after The Holiday because that movie ended but we can watch the tv series 90 Day Fiancé for the continuation of such stories.

With the 90 Day Fiancé tv franchise, because they have several spinoffs, we learn what it takes to bring your foreign love interest to American shores and build a life with them. These real-life stories first intrigued me because when I was fresh out of college I went to work as a researcher for a writer in the Caribbean country of Guadeloupe.

There I met a strapping, and I do mean strapping, young man named Patrick. He was suave. He was debonair. We met while I was walking down the freeway. He pulled his little white foreign car in front of me, poked his head out the window looking back at me, and came to my rescue.

“Blaw blaw blaw blaw,” he said to me in French because I didn’t understand the language very well, so I don’t know what he was asking me.

“Je ne comprends pas francàise,” I answered in my poor dialect of the language. “Je parlè Anglaise.”

“I speaky English,” he muttered.

I explained to him where I was trying to go. He let me into his car and we were off. Our romantic journey commenced with me noticing he had on a wedding ring.

“Tu est marié?” I asked, which means are you married?

“Que?” he replied, so I pointed to his wedding band.

“My wife, my wife, finished my wife.”

“Finished your wife,” I thought to myself. “What did you do, kill her?” A week later, I had to return home to the United States.

Back to how this relates to 90 Day Fiancé, Patrick wanted to come to the United States, but I didn’t know if we would stay together or if he’d run off with someone else once he got here. I knew I couldn’t support us both and I had no idea what he could do for work. I didn’t take a chance on love for fear of heartache.

Now I often wonder if I made a mistake by not bringing him here and exploring the length of our love. Thank goodness I have this show to reassure me that I probably did the right thing not letting him come to America.

As I started watching the tv show, I learned how much people have to go through to bring a foreign love to this country. They have to apply for and pay a hefty cost for a K-1 Visa.

Once the Visa is approved, the couple has 90 days to marry, or the foreign person has to return home. Both people start to whine about how 90 days isn’t enough time to get to know one another leaving me to blurt out to the screen, “You had at least a year before the Visa was approved. Why weren’t you trying to get to know each other then?”

As their time to the wedding day ticks down, rifts begin to form. The foreign love is disappointed with where and how the American really lives because they were expecting to live a lifestyle that they’ve seen in American movies.

The families and friends of the American accuse the foreigner of only wanting a green card. And soon the marriage roles and cultural differences begin to tear at the fabric of their love.

“WHY DIDN’T YOU LEARN ABOUT THEIR CULTURE OR TALK ABOUT THE MARRIAGE ROLES BEFORE YOU BROUGHT THEM HERE?” I blurt at the screen again, shaking my head and rolling my eyes.

In many of the relationships, when the pressure becomes to much the man ends up cheating and the woman seems so surprised but in some cultures it’s acceptable for the man to be with other women. It was really good to learn that men in Columbia are the only men in the world who don’t cheat.

The show is even more insane when it’s the American who has moved across the world to the foreign person’s country and cultural differences come up. The American inevitably says, “I DON’T HAVE TO DO A DAMN THING. I’M AN AMERICAN AND I PAY MY TAXES!”

At some point one or the other of the couple mentions, “You don’t seem to understand. I left my family, my friends, my job, everything to be here with you. I’m alone all the time. My family can’t be at my wedding. I can’t drive for a year or work for a year. I have nothing and you’re not here for me.”

I take a deep breath. Slowly consume the last few drops of my wine. Empathy for the pain being wrenched from the gut of the crying heap of a person on my tv should be my first thought but instead what comes to mind is, “Oh suck it up. You mean, you have no life outside of controlling and manipulating this other human? My life is so much better than this.”

And there you have it. The Holiday and 90 Day Fiancé are like two sides of a coin that makes us feel better about our lives in almost opposite ways—the fantasy escape and the hard reality that we can mock to lift our spirits.

Now, I’m hooked on the tv show and can’t wait to watch the next episode or new season of hopeful couples on Friday and Sunday nights. Multiple spin-offs of the show leave me contemplating getting in contact with the producers and pitching my own show called 90 Day Fiancé The One That Got Away. A show about those of us who didn’t take the risk, let our foreign loves go, and what became of our lives. I’d watch that. Wouldn’t you?

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