The new ITV documentary “I Married the Waiter: Love in the Sun” tells the tales of British women who fell in love with local men they met while on holidays in the sun. It focuses on the ups and downs of their love stories and includes enduring marriages to broken hearts.

Naturally, Greece the land of the “Greek lover” could not be missing from the heart-felt tales of love and romance that continued even after the planes had landed. Specifically, the program features Anne, Dawn and Jean who all fell in love with different men that lived on the island of Symi.

Dawn and Panormitis Karagiannis met in 2001 on picturesque Symi  and ended up living together as part of a traditional Greek lifestyle where Dawn’s mother-in-law cooks. Despite the cultural shock, Dawn says:

“We’re not romantic in perhaps the normal way that romance is perceived, we are romantic in the way that since the first time we really looked at each other we have just been together and wanted to be together.”

It didn’t work the same way for Anne Zouroudi who met her husband on Symi in 1990 but soon discovered that she didn’t want to be a traditional Greek wife in the sense that George wanted. She says:

“After the marriage, George did change, he wanted me to be far more the Greek housewife than the English woman. I learned to clean things in the house that I never knew needed cleaning.”

The silver lining was that Anne, to make up for her loneliness, found solace in writing and became a successful novelist with a book based on her experience, titled “The Messenger of Athens”. This proved of be the first of a series of seven.

Anne’s friend, Jean Manship, also fell in love with a man, Michalis, but they broke up when she couldn’t have children:

“When we met he was 23 and I was 40 – so by the time he wanted to get married I was 45, he wanted children. Not feasible – so he said, ‘Well I am going to have to look for a wife.’ It was all very amicable and I said that’s fine.”

Another unusual tale with a huge age difference is that of Dorothy Sims, aged 70, and her future husband, a waiter aged 21, in Tunisia. She says:

“There was an instant attraction between me and this waiter, but I never said anything, I never did anything and then he sent me a little note, would I like to go for a coffee. Out of the blue. And I said to my sister, ‘Is he crackers, what does he want with an old biddy like me with all these young birds around?’”

Unfortunately, the romance ended when Rafaa was refused entry to Britain even though the couple were married. Dorothy says she was heartbroken.

Fleur Ozdemir met Ferit on a 2009 holiday. He found her on Faceboko and the romance blossomed. After they married Ferit came to Newcastle, but he found it a struggle to live in England where the weather was cold. The same story unraveled for Ruth and Turkish Hasan when the pair married in 2010 and moved to the UK. Ruth says:

“I don’t fancy him any more, it sounds awful but I don’t. I don’t know what I felt in the beginning but [I] certainly don’t feel it any more.”