’90 Day Fiance’: Does the Show Match Couples Together?
90 Day Fiance continues to get crazier with each season. The biggest draw to the show and all of its iterations is the cast members. Each season it seems like the producers search out the most insane people and relationships to feature on the show. Because of the drastic differences between some of the cast members, viewers have started to wonder how much of the franchise is real. Are the love stories on the show actually real? Or does TLC match singles and get them to pretend to be star-crossed lovers?
Claims that the relationships are fake
There have been several relationships on the show that have been too outlandish for people to believe that they are real. Tim Malcolm and Jeniffer Tarazona’s relationship on 90 Day Fiance: Before the 90 Days was one of them, mostly because Malcolm seemed repulsed by the idea of having sex with Tarazona. Later, he chalked up his lack of sexual intimacy with Tarazona to the fact that he found other aspects of the relationship more important.
“I’m almost 40 years old,” he told Entertainment Tonight. “I want to be in love. I know sex is an important part of love, but it’s not everything like it used to be. My biggest goal was just building a foundation that I thought would be able to last because I don’t want to be divorced. I’ve waited this long to get married. I’ve never been married. I think that’s just strange that society just thinks if a man says no then he’s gay. If a woman says no, it’s fine. But it’s like the double standard that society has.”
Later, it was revealed that Malcolm and Tarazona may have actually broken up before the TLC cameras got involved and got back together to go on the show. And Malcolm even admitted that he always wanted to be on tv.
“Well, to be honest, I was told my entire adult life that I was made for reality,” he told Fox News of why he wanted to go on 90 Day Fiance. “I’ve got a very expressive face and I enjoy being in front of the camera. You know, I’d always wanted to be on TV so I thought that this was the perfect opportunity.”
Are the relationships real?
Jay and Ashley Smith were also accused of only being together for the show, but she recently revealed in an Instagram Q&A that that is just not true.
“We were together way before the show ever was involved,” she said. “They became involved a week before Jay’s visa interview (His visa interview took 10 months from start to finish.) A casting agent messaged me on Facebook after I commented in an immigration chat room asking questions in regards to the interview process. I never heard of the show or applied.”
Executive producer Matt Sharp also confirmed that the show has no hand in pairing people.
“These are people that are very much in the queue for a visa already,” he said on the Reality Life podcast.
“We always wanted this to be a super-authentic, warts and all, look at love in this amazing world, very raw, the producers we brought in…a lot of them came from the Teen Mom world,” he said. “There’s an authenticity to that show, too.”
