Beyond the Drama: 90 Day Fiancé's Truths on Intercultural Relationships
A guilty pleasure with a 54% success rate and a lot to teach us
By Jessie Wang
January 2025 · 8 min read
Everyone has their reality TV guilty pleasure. Mine is 90 Day Fiancé, a pretty controversial pick which some have gone as far as to call exploitative. Because of the setup, unlike Love is Blind or The Bachelor, where most people are rooting for the couples, 90 Day Fiancé has lots of naysayers that are watching and waiting for it to fall apart.
The love feels implausible, the situations uncomfortable, how could the couple possibly work?
The success rate for couples on 90 Day Fiance who went from 'I do' to still being together — almost the same as Love is Blind.
For me, that is even more impressive because no one in 90 Day Fiancé takes an extensive test, they don't have a villa or an apartment that they are given, and the majority of them come from very different backgrounds with most of them having almost the same timeline.
Because many of these couples come from differing perspectives, they are forced into conversations and resolution, and in working through it so visibly, these couples give us real insight — not just into the unique challenges of intercultural relationships, but into the principles that can help any of us build something more honest with the person we love.
3 Dynamics from 90 Day Fiancé and What We Can Learn
1. The Undiscussed Cultural Hierarchy
In every couple, there is one individual who is from the US and then another who is from another country. The most common demographics in 90 Day Fiancé are from the Philippines, Colombia, and Russia. While they are all branded as the “foreigner,” they are all compared against the baseline of being American but still unequal, and we create discrimination based on different characteristics.
90 Day Fiance: The Other Way
The spin-off where the American partner moves abroad has the highest relationship success rate in the entire franchise. When the American partner is living in their partner's country, there is usually less of a hierarchy of foreigners and most foreigners are lumped as one.
2. The Danger of the Default Culture
For the foreign partner in most intercultural relationships, the experience is exhausting in a way that's hard to articulate to someone who hasn't lived it. You are constantly translating — not just linguistically but existentially. You are the one who has adapted, adjusted, absorbed, and learned both cultures.
Partners who treated their own cultural norms as neutral, ignoring cultural difference rather than engaging with it, were less accepting of their partner's cultural expressions — which in turn predicted worse relationship outcomes.
What helps
The couples who did better were those who could name the difference without weaponising it. “I think this might be a cultural difference between us” is a very different sentence from “the way you were raised is the problem.”
3. Closing the Gap of the Couple Fit
Every couple has to navigate a set of what therapists sometimes call “social graces” — the core dimensions of life that culture shapes most deeply: Gender, Geography, Race, Religion, Age, Ability, Appearance, Class, Culture, Ethnicity, Education, Employment, Sexuality, Sexual Orientation, and Spirituality.
Social Graces
The core dimensions of life that culture shapes most deeply. For any couple, understanding where each person sits on these dimensions and how far apart they are is some of the most important work a relationship can do. For intercultural couples, the distances on these dimensions tend to be greater.
That doesn't make the relationship harder to love in, but it does make this work more urgent.
What This Means in Practice
Couples in the UK are in an inter-ethnic relationship, a figure that has grown by 35% in a decade. In the US, interracial marriages have more than doubled in a generation.
Get curious about the roots of your own reactionsand know that curiosity is not the same as agreement. When something your partner does strikes you as strange or frustrating, the first question worth asking isn't “why are they like this?” but “why does this bother me?”
Name the culture without making it a verdict.“I think this might be a cultural difference between us” is a very different sentence from “the way you were raised is the problem.” The first opens a conversation. The second closes one.
Recognise that adaptation is not a one-way street.In most intercultural couples living in one partner's home country, the foreign partner does a vastly disproportionate share of the adapting.
Build your own couple's culture.Every couple, intercultural or not, has to do the same fundamental work: figure out their shared zone. The values, habits, and ways of being that belong to both of them — not just one.
The difficulties are what makes it worth watching seriously — because these couples show us that love across difference isn't about erasing the difference. It's about building something new together.
Jessie Wang
BACP-Registered Couples TherapistJessie works with intercultural and LGBTQ+ couples in London, drawing on EFT, Gottman Method, and systemic approaches.
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