At some point in the past five months, you’ve probably asked yourself a series of questions. Will anything ever go back to normal? Is the world ending? And finally, if you’re a fan of 90 Day Fiancé, is Nicole Nafziger… still in Morocco? Up until Aug. 12, the answer to the last question would have been “yes,” but it seems the prodigal daughter of our favorite TLC franchise has finally returned home. And now, we have some questions.
There’s a lot to unpack when it comes to Nicole’s unexpected five month vacation in Agadir, Morocco. And while we may never know the inner workings of Nicole’s brain, we do (roughly) know the timeline of her 2020 adventures, which is meaningful for two reasons.
One, it pretty much confirms that she was in Morocco (which is something we questioned back in April), and therefore, reason number two: since she was likely in Morocco for close to half a year, then… does it stand to reason that she’s still in a relationship with Azan?
But what about Nicole’s life in Florida, and most notably, her daughter May? Why would Nicole stay so long in Morocco, and what does her family think of this decision? I turn to — where else, the internet, social media, and Covid and travel-related message boards — to find hints of Nicole’s truth buried beneath Moroccon lockdowns and Starbucks’ cups of coffee.
(The Dipp reached out to Nicole for comment on the timing of her return from Morocco and the current status of her relationship with Azan, but did not hear back.)
Let’s take this month by month.
MARCH, 2020: Nicole Leaves Florida For Morocco, COVID-19 Happens, Etc.
This entire saga — where is Nicole and what is she doing — began when, according to Instagram, Nicole arrived in Agadir on March 11 to visit her fiancé Azan, whom she hasn’t seen in years. From the very beginning, even before COVID-19 and canceled return trips came into the picture, there were rumors that she wasn’t in Morocco with Azan at all, or that if she was, she was staying at an Airbnb, alone.
In late April, I dove deep into all of the speculation about Nicole’s trip (retroactively, let’s call that Part 1 and this investigation Part 2), and sunk into whether or not she was posting old content on Instagram and pretending it was new, just to make it seem like she was in Morocco, when maybe, she really wasn’t. It was a wild ride.
That said, once Morocco started to employ some of the strictest COVID-19 protocols internationally, making it so that both inter-city and international travel was limited, and once you took into account Nicole’s cryptic and sporadic Instagram posts (even though most of which had nothing to do with her time in Morocco at all), it gradually became clear that Nicole was almost certainly in Morocco.
APRIL, 2020: Nicole Is Definitely In Morocco?
And then came April 2020, the month where most of us convinced things would, like, probably get better? In just a few weeks? Right? Except they didn’t. And even though America seemed to be unclear on how we were going to fight the whole COVID-19 thing, by the end of the month, Morocco had implemented even more intense restrictions.
On April 7, 2020, Morocco instituted nation-wide, mandatory mask laws, complete with up to a $130 fine or three months jail time for not wearing them. This, in combination with strict travel rules, contributed to Morocco having one of the lowest COVID-19 death rates in the world. It also very likely contributed to Nicole’s inability to get a flight home.
However, for all of April 2020, Nicole was silent on Instagram. No grid posts at all. But, please note that her mother Robbalee Nafziger replied to a fan on Instagram and insinuated that Nicole was indeed in Morocco, doing well, and calling home everyday.
Here’s where I’ll mention that at the end of April, Nicole had 576,000 Instagram followers. Despite her relative silence on the platform, interest around the 90 Day stalwart has only grown over the last few months: As of late August, she has 649,000 followers.
Maybe it’s because she knows how to weave a very interesting web that you and I can’t help but get entangled in. Onward…
MAY, 2020: Nicole Is… Still… Probably In Morocco?
Suddenly, like a spider pouncing on its prey to vomit digestive fluids all over it, Nicole reappeared on social media on May 19. Paired with a photo of her holding a coffee, her caption read, “Throwback pic to when we could still go to the cafe for a cup of coffee.” It went on to ask, “How is everyone? I’ve been away from social media for a while.” (We’re not great, Nicole! Not great!). “How’s quarantine life for y’all?” (*Gestures vaguely to general sense of chaos all around.*)
Notably, the caption contained no explanation of where she was, when or if she was coming home, why she couldn’t come home if she wanted to, or why she wasn’t posting any photos with Azan.
May is also the month when Robbalee started responding — via her quilting and sewing-focused Instagram account (clearly, people were desperate for answers) — to more questions about Nicole’s time in Morocco. According to Robbalee, Nicole was “participating in Ramadan,” had spotty wifi, and wasn’t able to come home due to a restriction on “international travel.”
She also described Nicole’s efforts to travel home as a “work in progress.” Alrighty then.
JUNE 2020: Is Nicole Ever Coming Home At All?
In June, Nicole started posting regularly in her Instagram feed again — mostly updates from home in Florida and photos of her daughter. She shared six photos all together: one was for the social justice movement #blackoutTuesday, four were of May doing adorable things, and one was an appreciation post for her mother Robbalee.
It’s this post dedicated to her mom that insinuated Nicole was still in Morocco. The photo, which could’ve been taken anytime over the last couple of years, was shared with the caption: “Missing my mom so much♥️ She is the best mom and grandma out there♥️ Thank you for taking care of my little girl since I can’t come back home yet @srqquilters.”
Key word there being “missing” and key phrase there being “I can’t come back home yet.”
On the same day, June 26, 4,000 miles away, Robbalee was responding to questions about Nicole on her quilting account again, and her answers corroborated Nicole’s caption that implied she can’t yet return to the States.
“Right now Florida is not even a safe place to come home to, when it is safe to travel she looks forward to coming home,” Robbalee wrote in response to a comment on Instagram. She also emphasized that there was no “abandonment” when it came to Nicole’s absence from daughter May’s life, noting that the two FaceTimed “almost every day.”
This last comment is odd, though, given that Robbalee said in the past that “internet is spotty in Morocco,” which made video-chatting unreliable.
It stands to reason that in June, Nicole was exploring her options when it came to traveling back to Florida.
July — month five — is when we start to see photos of Azan again.
July 2020: Wait, Nicole Might Be Trying To Come Home
In July, followers were treated to the occasional selfie of Nicole with Azan. She posted seven pictures in total, and two were with her fiancé. It was the first time since March 23 that Azan showed up in her feed.
On July 25, she captioned a photo of the two of them with: “So happy to have had this extra time with you, my love♥️ But soon I’ll get to see my little girl and I’m also very happy and excited for that♥️”
The next day, on July 26, she captioned a selfie with Azan: “Making every minute count with you until my time to leave your side again. It me and you baby. Only we know our love story and all the hard things we’ve been through. We’ve come out stronger then we have ever been before and we’ll continue to grow together. May and you are my family and my future♥️”
Again, it’s the word choice we’re honing in on here.
The phrase “making every minute count” is important for two reasons. One, it makes one believe that she was in Morocco with Azan (though, thanks to a lack of Instagram Story posts that showed the two together, in real-time, in Morocco, in the summer of 2020, it’s somewhat questionable), and two, combined with the more straight-forward phrasing of “soon I’ll get to see my little girl” and “until my time to leave your side”… it raises another question. Is Nicole trying to get home to Florida?
August, 2020: The Prodigal Daughter Returns
Exactly five months after she landed in Morocco, 90 Day Fiance Facebook sleuths noticed that Nicole started to post in a Facebook group for Americans trying to return from Morocco. She was asking about permissions needed to travel and the status of different flights.
A week later, Nicole was suddenly back on Instagram Stories, posting frequent updates just like old times (something she has done rarely since arriving in Morocco): She posted a photo at an airport Starbucks in Morocco. She shared an image of her meeting a fan on the plane from Morocco to the US.
All signs pointed to the fact that this was really happening: After 182 days, 25 cryptic Instagram posts, and approximately 500 paid IG story swipe-ups that implied she and Azan had broken up but actually contained no real information at all, Nicole Nafziger was coming home.
According to her Instagram posts, Nicole was back in Florida (as evidenced by a photo of her with her daughter May and a caption that read, “Soooo happy to finally be back with my baby girl”) as of August 11.
But if being a 90 Day Fiancé fan and a human living through the year 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that behind every morsel of good news is likely a burning trash fire of distress.
In other words, Nicole’s homecoming may seem straight-forward on the surface, but it raises even more questions that are worth exploring. Some are answerable with decent best-guesses, the others will keep us up at night for the next several weeks.
Why Now? Why August?
The first question: Why now? There’s some pretty solid evidence that Nicole really may have been prohibited to leave Morocco until August. Nicole posted her inquiries about an America-bound flight out of Morocco in a Facebook Group called, “US citizens trapped in Morocco,” which has more than 2,400 members.
After perusing dozens of posts within the group (and Nicole’s), it seems that the majority of difficulties people are having/have had leaving the country come down to two obstacles. The first is that the country’s lockdown requires people to have special permissions in order to travel virtually anywhere — including to different cities to catch a flight.
The second reason is that it seems that, according to other members of the group, flights are being canceled at the last minute if they don’t reach at least 50 percent capacity. These cancelations, according to Group members and reports from Moroccan World News, happen often — something that makes Nicole’s last-minute questions about flights make sense.
When you consider all of the above and take into account the very strict lockdown that Morocco employed at the beginning of the pandemic, it could make sense that Nicole’s stay in the country lasted months longer than anticipated.
According to Morocco World News, there’s also another factor that could have contributed to her return to Florida — a notification from the Morocco’s US Embassy that “foreign citizens in the country without a visa who were unable to depart Morocco within the normal 90-day limit will be permitted to exit without a fine until at least August 10.”
Though there seemed to be confusion as to what exactly the fine would be for Americans who remained in Morocco past August 10 (or if it would even be enforced), it once again stands to reason that Nicole wasn’t willing to wait around and find out.
So, She’s Still With Azan?
Now. All that doesn’t begin to answer what her time in lockdown with Azan (if she was with Azan the entire time) was like, though, so we are left to go on what little tidbits she has shared on Instagram.
In her most recent post with Azan, posted August 9, the couple is pictured smiling behind masks. Given the April 7 mask order, we can guess that this pic could have been taken anytime since then. In the caption, Nicole writes, “I’m so happy I got to see you baby. Hopefully next time I won’t have to leave and we’ll be a family with May.”
So happy she got to see him? Once again, we go back to her word choice. After spending six months together, all day every day, simply “seeing” him doesn’t feel like the right description, does it?
Are we to believe — and do we believe?? — that their relationship, one built on dysfunction and deep incompatibility if you trust the 90 Day portrayal of it, anyway, truly survived six months of more or less 24/7 togetherness during a global pandemic?
As Keisa Pope-East, admin of a popular Facebook Group for 90 Day, Married to Millions, and Married At First Sight fans tells The Dipp: “Nicole’s life appears to be a mess and people love to follow messy stories. She is in love with Azan, but it isn’t clear how Azan feels about her…fans only follow her to see how her story ends.” We really can’t get enough of it, can we. Sigh.
If Nicole’s time in Morocco taught us anything at all, it’s that she seems uniquely determined to keep a sticky netting of mystery around her and Azan’s relationship that fans cannot escape.
As she wrote to Azan in her July 26 caption, which is public to all 649,000 of her followers, almost all of whom exist due to the nationally televised reality show depiction of her relationship, “Only we know our love story and all the hard things we’ve been through.”
On August 23, Nicole posted on Instagram Stories a boomerang of May throwing a rock in a pond.
Images: TLC Screenshot; Instagram