Once, TikToker Sabrina (@the3rdside) was engaged, but it turned out that her Tunisian ex-fiancé was just pretending to love her for a green card. She is half-Tunisian and understands the culture well.
She speaks the language and even has family living in the country. So, when she got engaged to a Tunisian man, she never thought that he would take advantage of her.
“My friends in Tunisia warned me,” said Sabrina. “They all told me to be careful. They all saw it for what it is. But I was blind at the time. I truly thought that this man loved me for me.”
“Now that I’m married to a different man, an American man, I understand how that was not love at all. That was manipulation, and that was control.”
Her ex-fiancé made her feel like a “cash cow.” She was a victim of financial coercion. He used a lot of emotional manipulation to get her to send him money and gifts every month or even every two weeks. He would make her feel guilty, as well as make fun of her body and the clothes she wore.
He started dictating what she could wear and called her fat. It got to the point where he began commenting on her body hair and called her a monkey because of it.
On the day that she was going to file the K1 visa to allow her fiancé to travel to the United States to get married, a bunch of problems kept popping up that prevented her from filing it. Things were happening at work and with her family.
While she was filling out the information for the visa, she realized there was one piece of information she didn’t have. When she was trying to reach out to her fiancé to get that information, she found out through the grapevine that he was cheating on her.
So, Sabrina ended it by blocking him. To this day, she still hasn’t talked to him. She pointed out that if she had married him and gotten divorced, she would still be financially responsible for him for 10 years.
“That means if they don’t pay their rent or if they have medical bills that go unpaid, that goes directly to you; you are going to be the one who pays that,” said Sabrina.
Overall, Sabrina is tired of seeing men from her culture treat women poorly, and she’s warning other women like her to think twice before marrying a man from another country in need of a green card. She wants to spare them from the same situation that she went through.
It’s also upsetting to her that men from her culture have made scamming women into romantic relationships a stereotype because that reflects badly on their culture.
She knows not all men or immigrants do this, but it happens often enough that she wants to warn others.
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By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
