Belgium’s increasingly restrictive migration policies highlight its progressive shift towards a regime of immobility that places migrants in situations of enforced temporariness. In this paper, we focus in particular on legal frameworks and procedures that lead people to experience episodes of accelerations, suspensions and disruptions (Robertson, 2015), and on the inter-relations of these legal rhythms and temporalities with migrants’ love, marriage and family formation decisions, practices, plans, and the specific temporalities of family life. We do so by focusing on 3 case studies with nationals from the Democratic Republic of Congo, India and the United States residing in Belgium. Our key hypothesis is that enforced temporariness produces specific experiences of time that deprive migrants from the right/capacity to lead their family life according to their plans and aspirations. In this paper, we examine these questions through the lens of temporal frictions in the everyday experiences of institutional timescales, and between institutional and migrants’ biographic timescales in relation with family life.