Wednesday, Jul 21, 2021 • 20min
Loving Across Borders
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At age 11, Julissa Arce came to the United States from Mexico on a visa that expired three years later. For more than a decade, she lived as an undocumented immigrant, fearful of revealing her secret to anyone. “Every phone call or email I got from human resources would make my blood run cold,” she wrote in her Modern Love essay. And when it came to love, she would lie to nearly every man she dated, fearing the threat of exposure and deportation.
On today’s episode, we hear about an undocumented immigrant’s search for love — and what it taught her about isolation and intimacy. Then, we hear from two Modern Love listeners who have kept their long-distance relationships alive during the pandemic.
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Speakers
(5)
Frankie Corzo
Valentina Marinovich
Miya Lee
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Transcript
Verified
Break
Miya Lee
01:39
From the
New York
Times, I'm Miya Lee.Share
Daniel Jones
01:42
And I'm Dan Jones. This is the modern love podcast.
Share
Miya Lee
01:46
You know, often when people are first dating, they hide things about themselves in order to appear in the best light.
Share
Daniel Jones
01:54
Right they do, but in this essay a woman has to hide a really essential part of herself in order to survive, and over time that just takes a huge toll.
Share
Miya Lee
02:04
The essay is called telling the truth wasn't an option.
Share
Daniel Jones
02:09
It's written by
Julissa Arce
and read by Frankie Corzo.Share
Frankie Corzo
02:24
Before I was even old enough to have a boyfriend. I was trained to lie to him. "My secret", my mother said, "could be used against me". "You can never tell anyone you're undocumented".
Share
02:38
When I was 11, my parents, who had been living and working in
The United States
for years, brought me from Mexico
to join them in Texas
. Three years later, my US
visa expired, and I became one of 11 million undocumented people in this country.Share
02:59
I didn't understand the implications of my immigration status, only that it was a weapon that could be used against me. The first time I lied was in 11th grade at a party with my crush Chris. When the police arrived in response to a noise complaint, I took off running into the backyard and jumped the fence. He said, I overreacted, not knowing I could be deported if I got caught.
Share
03:29
My fear of discovery was ever present at school where I excelled in college where I graduated cum laude and in my first finance job in
New York City
. Working for Goldman Sachs
. When would my lies begin to unravel? Every phone call or email I got from human resources would make my blood run cold. Yet it never happened after Chris, I lied to nearly every man I ever dated.Share
04:04
In college, I finally pushed aside my mother's advice about hiding my status with the guy I was then seeing, who had driven me an hour to eat my favorite tacos. On the ride back to campus, I took a deep breath and said, "I don't have papers". I exhaled with relief over speaking the secret that had been crushing me for so long.
Share
04:27
A few years later, after he and I moved from
Texas
to New York City
, I discovered that he was cheating on me. I found the woman's number and threatened to call it. "If you call her", he said, "I'll call ICE".
After that, it took me years to share my immigration status again with anyone. The next time was when my father had passed away, and I couldn't travel to Mexico
to be with him.Share
04:54
In a moment of desperation, I shared my undocumented status with my then boyfriend. "I can't be here anymore", I said weeping, "I'm going to move back to
Mexico"
. The pressures of my immigration status left us with two choices, break up or get married. We chose to elope, so we could stay together in the United States
.Share
05:19
But after saying I do, our entire relationship became about filling out paperwork, meeting with lawyers and having interviews with immigration officials to prove our love, we never had a honeymoon. I became a
US
citizen. But the years long process extinguished our romance, and we eventually divorced.Share
05:45
More than a decade later, newly single, I downloaded
Bumble
and matched with a bearded hipster. After telling him about my past. I never heard from him again.Share
05:57
Next, I swiped right on a handsome Mexican man with sun kissed skin and a flirtatious smile. On our first date, he told me how he used to build fighting rings for his wrestling toys as a boy and now worked at an architecture office.
Share
06:15
My mother would approve, but would she still want me to lie? I told him I was a writer, there one truth, and he told me about his travels to
Europe
. "I never traveled anywhere when I was younger", he said, and I knew as soon as I could afford it, I wanted to see the world.Share
06:36
My favorite trip had been the one I took to
Mexico
to see my family after getting my papers, but I couldn't tell him that, not yet. Here I was on my first date with witty, kind-hearted Fernando, wishing I could unburden myself and speak honestly. But I was too scared to trust that it wouldn't ruin everything before it began. So once again I chose the lie of omission.Share
07:05
Soon it was 2:00 a. m. and the restaurant was closing, seven hours after we arrived. "I had a great time", I said, "when can I see you again? " He said.
Share
07:23
A few weeks and many dates later I was headed to
Antigua
for my best friend's wedding with a layover in New York
. As soon as I landed at JFK
I realized I didn't have my U. S. Passport, which I would need for my flight the next morning. I panicked, I found out the only way for me to make the wedding was if someone were to drive my passport to LAX
and place it on the last overnight flight to JFK
a service I didn't even know existed.Share
07:52
Fernando's office was only a few miles away from my apartment, but I hesitated to ask him for help. My
US
passport was in the same drawer as my Mexican one, which I had not updated since my divorce. Mexican passports for married women require them to list their husband's last name. I hadn't told Fernando about my first marriage.Share
08:17
Now he might see my name next to my ex-husband's. What if Fernando saw that and thought I was still married? Would he ever let me explain? I thought about all the friends weddings I missed because I couldn't travel outside the country, and how much I regretted not being there for the people I loved. I couldn't do it again.
Share
08:46
If Fernando eventually came to love me, he would need to understand or at least accept my need to hide the more difficult points of my life. I called him "okay", he said, "I'm on it, tell me what to do". I gave him the combination to my cat sitters lockbox for keys and explained where to find my passport.
Share
09:14
The next morning, I picked it up from the airline counter and boarded my flight. As we ascended, I decided I would tell Fernando everything when I returned, I was tired of the evasion and lies. I am an American citizen, and if I couldn't finally be free of my past, then all those years of anxiety would be for not.
Share
09:41
Maybe Fernando would run, as had so many others, when he learned the truth. That I had spent more than 10 years undocumented that I had used fake papers to work at
Goldman Sachs
, that I was divorced at 33. Would it all be too much? Would he ever trust me?Share
10:05
Romance may thrive on mystery, but love can't be built on lies. When I got back home and what a glorious word that is home. I met Fernando at a quiet bar down the street from my apartment. We sat on a red velvet couch, his hand resting on my lap as I told him about the wedding in
Antigua
and thanked him for rescuing my passport.Share
10:33
Then I paused and bit my lip. "Is everything okay? " He said, "I have to tell you something". I said, "I'll answer your questions, but let me finish". He sat up, "okay", he said, but he never let go of my hands. As the truth flowed from me backfilling my past, he never looked away, never raised an eyebrow, never signaled any judgment.
Share
11:10
"That's it? " He said, "I thought you were going to tell me you killed someone". He pulled my hand toward his face and kissed it, "life is complicated". He didn't ask where I bought my fake papers, why my parents didn't fix my immigration status, or why I hadn't gone back to
Mexico
if things were so difficult here.Share
11:38
Instead, at the end of the night, he asked me the same question he had asked after our first date. "When can I see you again? " I had spent so many years keeping people at arm's length, believing that isolating myself was necessary. I carried a heavy load of guilt over all the lies I told to stay in this country, to grasp onto the few crumbs of love I was given.
Share
12:10
I accepted crumbs instead of looking for a whole person, someone who understood that love for those of us who have to hide the truth to survive, sometimes drives us to take seemingly indefensible actions.
Share
12:25
For my entire life, I believed finding love was all up to me. If only I could figure out the perfect formula of what to omit, what to say and how and when to say it, love would be mine. But what I really needed was a husband who doesn't judge me, fault me, or question the difficult choices I made to carve out a life in
America.
Now that I have found a home in Fernando's heart, I refuse to hide or apologize for any of it.Share
Miya Lee
13:35
After the break, we hear two stories from our listeners, Greg Cope White and Valentina Marinovich who were both separated from their partners by national borders during the pandemic.
Share
Break
Greg Cope White
14:39
I'm Greg Cope White. I'm a screenwriter and author and
a U. S. Marine
. My partner and I have been together almost 15 years. His name is Bob. He lives in Montreal
, I live in Santa Monica
. So when covid
hit, and we were stuck. We've been apart since January 20, 2020.Share
Valentina Marinovich
15:10
My name is Valentina, I'm a fashion designer. I was 10 months separated from my boyfriend Rafa due to the pandemic. You're gonna laugh, but I actually met him on the street. So I was dating someone else at the moment, and we just crossed path in a red light in
New York
.Share
15:35
I immediately realized that he had an accent same as me, so I asked where he was from, and he was from
Spain
and I told that I was from Chile,
and he wanted to know more, and we went to have a drink, and then we had dinner and well he was leaving next day, and we kept messaging and texting for a month. And I broke up with my boyfriend, and we have been together since then, so like four years.Share
16:01
And after that we kept the relationship like long distance because I was in school, and he was working in
Madrid,
but we would see each other pretty often. So in March 2020 when we thought we were ready, and he was gonna move with me, the visa was approved and everything was done.Share
16:20
The pandemic hit, the consulate's closed, the borders started closing, and he couldn't travel like we were trapped, I was trapped in
the United States,
and he was in Spain
and that's how like the kind of like nightmares started.Share
Greg Cope White
16:37
Early on when the border closed, we thought it was gonna be over in a month, six weeks, we were used to that, we've done that. You know, I was like everybody else, I was going to treat the quarantine, the brief 30-day quarantine as a reboot. I was gonna do yoga every day, read the stack of books that I hadn't gotten to, I was gonna learn how to bake bread, all those things just another month apart, boom, boom easy, we've done that.
Share
Valentina Marinovich
17:16
I used to work in a big fashion company, and they were really, really hit due to the pandemic. So I decided to go back to
Chile
and wait for my boyfriend there. When I arrived I realized that the borders were also closed and when the exception for married couples was granted, we decided that we wanted to get married to be able to see each other again.Share
17:44
So the only option for us since Rafa was in
Spain,
and I was in Chile
was a proxy marriage. Okay, so how a proxy marriages work is basically you need to find a person to represent your husband or wife in the country. So I found someone that was willing to do it because he cannot be, for example, your brother. So there was one person in my same situation. So I asked Miguel that I could represent his girlfriend and he would represent Rafa.Share
18:16
So that day I was really nervous, and I remember being in the car talking to Miguel which I've only seen one time before, but it made me feel better just because we were in the same position and I knew how nervous he was and like I could see it, I could like, see his like voice trembling. So just the fact of having someone in your same boat made it easier.
Share
Greg Cope White
18:43
We have a practice that we do where we spend every night together on
Skype
every day at 6:30 his time, which is East Coast
3:30 my time, I put on a live Skype
cooking show. I spend a lot of time, all the onions, the peppers, the carrots, they're all in little separate dishes and I begin cooking. Now he's a really good cook, so he's watching me, he's asking me, "is that salt? Don't burn the fish".Share
19:20
And by the end of 20-30 minutes I've got a complete dinner ready to go that I'll eat in about an hour and a half and I let that sit and I move the laptop into the living room with the dining room and I sit down and enjoy talking to him while he eats whatever he's cooked.
Share
Valentina Marinovich
19:42
So we got married in this tiny office while my boyfriend was in the dentist, which was terrible, so I'm not going to say that it was romantic because it wasn't. And then I just like what's up him, "hey, we're married now, you cannot regret anymore", so that was it, it was so weird.
Share
20:04
After I think three weeks, he got his exception to travel to
Chile
. The airport was completely empty, I arrived there three hours before, just to make sure that I wouldn't miss him or something. So as soon as the doors opened I saw him, I kind of like run to him and I hugged him, and so we had for like five minutes, and it all came back to me like the smell, the feeling of his beard against my cheeks. So it was such a happy moment and like knowing that it was mine, you know that they couldn't take it away.Share
Greg Cope White
20:42
I have played our reunion over and over again in my head, as a writer I do kind of envision these things maybe a little more elaborately than other people do. You know
Whitney Houston
is there in the living room live singing Dolly Parton
is, you know, playing the tambourine. The whole soundtrack just swells as I come in the room, and he's just overcome with the site, and I just can't get the words out, we're just so excited.Share
21:15
But I know in fact what's gonna happen is I'm just gonna grab him and hold him and my voice is going to crack just like it is now.
Share
Miya Lee
21:37
Modern Love is produced by Julia Botero with help from Hans Buetow and Alyssa Dudley. It's edited by Sara Sarasohn. The executive producer is Wendy Dorr. This episode was mixed by Koresh Ripple, original music by Elisheba Ittoop and Marion Lozano. This week's essay was written by
Julissa Arce
and read by Frankie Corzo, Greg Cope White and Valentina Marinovich shared their covid
love stories.Share
22:21
Special thanks to Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Bonnie Wertheim, Anya Strzemien, Sam Dolnick and Ryan Wegner at autumn.
Share
Daniel Jones
22:31
I'm Dan Jones.
Share
Miya Lee
22:32
And I'm Miya Lee, this was our last episode of the season, we'll be back in the fall with more stories from
Modern Love
. Thank you so much for listening.Share
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Miya Lee
Daniel Jones
Frankie Corzo
Greg Cope White
Valentina Marinovich