When Ariana and her husband Joe took a trip to the Bahamas, they didn’t expect to hear so much about sex and drugs.
“When I was getting my license, I had to get a license to drive,” she says.
“And that was really hard.
But then the Bahamas just changed everything.
You could go to the bar, you could drink and you could get high and you couldn’t drive.”
But she soon found her new friend.
“I’m from the Dominican Republic, so I don’t have a lot of friends there,” she recalls.
“But I started to meet these guys that were like, ‘You know what, I like to go out and have fun.’
And they were like my closest friends.”
After the girls went out and had sex with strangers, they realized they had never seen the Dominican girls have sex with each other before.
“So they started doing it,” Ariana says.
The girls, who were in their early 20s at the time, also noticed a big difference in their looks.
“They started doing their hair, their makeup, their make-up and it’s not that they’re thin or anything like that,” Arians mother-in-law, Carla Pino, tells The Washington Post.
“It was like, well, we all grew up with this idea of beauty, and we’ve got these weird ideas of how beautiful you look and how beautiful the people around you are.”
The two young girls bonded over their love of making music, which was becoming a big part of their lives.
Ariana, who has a degree in English, was able to get her music out on the radio and in nightclubs because she had the right kind of connections.
But for the girls, that wasn’t enough.
“We were like two kids playing in a bar,” Pino says.
“‘Who is this?
Who is this?’
And I’m like, Oh my God, this is the only thing that we can do, and then we were like: ‘This is what we’re doing, this’s what we can’t do.’
We just had to try to make music and get it out there and it was hard because we were so young.”
The girls started playing music videos online and eventually began to have their own music videos and videos for each other.
The songs that emerged were not so dissimilar to those they had seen before.
But Ariana was more confident in the girls’ abilities than before.
“[We were] like, OK, we’re gonna be good, because we know how to do this,” she tells The Post.
They also shared a love of music videos.
“This is something that you can watch on YouTube,” Pinos daughter, Lacey Pino-Hudson, says.
Pino told her daughters that the girls should take classes online, but they would still have to go to a club to get the credits.
“If you want to go on YouTube, then go to my house, but you have to pay,” Pina said.
Arianas new band, R.E.M., followed suit and released a song called “We Are Never Going Back.”
Their music videos were popular enough to be featured on “The View” and on “Inside Edition.”
But when the girls started getting hitched, their fans were not happy.
“Our fans were really angry,” Arianas mother-of-one, Ariana Pino said.
“People were calling us fat, they were calling our parents fat, and they were saying that we were not good people.
It was really a really hard time.
I mean, I’m a really nice person, but I just felt like I was being used.”
When Arians band was finally called out on their behavior, it was the first time the girls had ever faced the kind of backlash that comes with being a couple.
But now, they say that they were ready for it.
“All of our fans started tweeting at us and saying we should have just gotten married, because it’s a big deal,” Arias mother-to-be says.
Arias first love, however, has been sex.
“The first thing I did was have sex,” she laughs.
“Then I had sex again, and it felt so good.”
Ariana’s music video for “We Never Go Back” reached over 10 million views on YouTube within a week.
The song made it to the top of the charts, and after years of waiting, Arianas band, with the help of a lawyer, got married.
Arians husband Joe says that the couple started to date as soon as they were married.
“As soon as we were married, we started getting a lot more love from people, and I got really close with some of my girlfriends,” Joe says.
They met in the Bahamas
