Credit: CP Illustration: Jeff Schrekengost

Lately, I’ve been burning the candle at both ends and, as a result, experiencing intense burnout. This past weekend, when my partner was out of town and I had the house to myself, I made a deliberate decision to not do anything work-related. I cooked, I built a 1,000-piece puzzle, and I watched two seasons of 90 Day Fiancé: The Other Way.

For the unfamiliar, 90 Day Fiancé is a reality television show about Americans who fall in love with people from other countries and bring them to the U.S. on a K1 fiancé visa. They have 90 days to marry their partners before their visas expire. “The Other Way” is a version of the show where Americans go and live in their partners’ country with the intent of marrying them and settling abroad.

Those of you who know me know I’m a sucker for all relationship reality TV shows. I’ve sunk hundreds of hours into Love is Blind, Married at First Sight, Couple to Thruple, and so many more (I’ve been told to try Love Island, but I haven’t yet gotten into it).

While I don’t watch other forms of reality TV, these love and marriage shows strike a chord in me. I’m a romantic at heart and a relationship junkie, and I am endlessly interested in how people negotiate their love lives. Part of the appeal of these shows, for me, is that they allow for a degree of escapism — from my own life to the (often messy) lives of others. I’m sure there’s a German word for this.

That being said, my interest isn’t only voyeuristic. Though these shows are obviously overdramatized and heavily edited and produced, I do learn a great deal about effective and ineffective communication patterns, the way that past trauma informs current relationships, and how upbringing and culture impact our assumptions about what a relationship should be. It is often much easier to see these things in others than in ourselves.

Sometimes this isn’t exactly comfortable. For example, when watching a young woman from the Philipines have a panic attack because she feared being abandoned by her obviously loyal partner, I cringed a little knowing that I’ve also had similarly irrational emotional responses in my relationships that stem from deep attachment wounds. My desire to shake her and say, “Damn girl, pull it together, he’s not going anywhere!” reminded me to turn that advice on myself.

90 Day Fiancé: The Other Way may be my favorite of these shows because there’s something delicious about watching Americans attempt to assimilate into cultures and families much different than their own, not to mention the woven tapestry of languages, food, fashion, religions, and more. I got to watch a fashion designer from L.A. fight with her Egyptian husband about the modesty of her clothes, a hairstylist from middle America struggle to feel safe in South Africa, an older gay man who has been out for decades struggle to understand why his Mexican partner is so afraid to come out to his traditional family, and a woman who has been single and living on her own for a long time work to fit into an Indian shared family home.

It wasn’t until I started writing this piece that it dawned on me that some of the pleasure that I get from this show may stem from the fact that my first marriage was an inter-cultural one — my ex-husband had only moved to the United States less than three years before I met him. Differences that were interesting and sexy at the beginning of our relationship became harder to manage the older we got. Once kids, a house, and adult responsibilities entered the mix, the differences in how we saw money, parenting, and division of labor became more and more apparent. There is something satisfying about witnessing that we weren’t the only people who found it hard to bridge the gulf between different languages, cultures, and upbringings — it’s just hard. In the wrap-up “Tell All” episode at the end of the season, the fashion designer in a power struggle with her Egyptian husband about her wardrobe said (and I’m paraphrasing), “One thing that I’ve learned is that culture runs deep.”

I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting that we ought to only partner with people who grew up the same way that we did. Certainly one of the beautiful things about these relationships is that they force those within them to change and grow, something that we should strive for in any relationship. Moreover, marrying someone who grew up in the same neighborhood as you doesn’t guarantee that you will be on the same page.

Instead, perhaps what we can take from these international marriage shows are examples of how people try to overcome differences between themselves and their partners and show each other love each other in the process. Some couples are better at this than others, which is also true in real life. I recently interviewed writer Charlotte Shane about her recent book, An Honest Woman, which is largely about marriage, and she says, of her husband, “He’s a separate person, and I can’t control him. The most I can hope for is that we maintain our love and respect for each other and that we do everything that we can to do that.” It seems like this is the most all of us can hope for, and certainly something to celebrate if we achieve it.

Jessie Sage is a Pittsburgh-based sex worker, writer, and the host of the podcast When We’re Not Hustling: Sex Workers Talking About Everything But.