Mail Order Brides – It’s a term you hear referred to quite often, yet so many men go into the search for a mail order bride with an inaccurate idea of the landscape they are entering. Do mail order brides actually exist? Let’s examine the landscape a little.
Ten years ago, almost every man seeking a Russian bride would have been relatively wealthy in his own country; he had to be in order to manage the process as it stood then. He would therefore, in all likelihood have been older than the average man seeking to marry in his own country and certainly older than the women he was meeting.
This is because back then the market for foreign brides was different; the marriage agencies were small and often used snail mail to send out printed catalogues of their offerings. There was little or no support for travelers when they went on a wife hunt, but there were many, many young women who, often with the support and connivance of their families, sought a more secure and better life with ‘the rich foreign man’.
Since then the market has opened up. The internet is more widely used and the mail order bride industry is accessible to more guys and thus the clients tend to move toward the mean in various aspects of their nature. They are likely to be younger now than a few years ago, likely to be less rich, but I would suggest also less capable of finding a wife in their own peer group.
My recollection of the guys seeking a Russian bride when I first hit upon the industry back in 1998 was that they were pretty well sorted, not all the kind of guy you’d want to have as best friend, but usually pretty strong and self starting blokes who would be expected to sort out their own relationships.
As the market is made easier to enter for the men and as the agencies seek to cast their net ever wider in search of fresh blood the results seem not too happy and that is without considering the good women who are now, it seems getting as rare as hens’ teeth.
Losers buying wives? No, not any more.
Now the losers never get that far, there are vastly fewer women willing to sell themselves, and those that do want to sell themselves through an agency are much more aware of their market value. Just consider how rarely we see stories of green card frauds? In almost every case now, the scams are of the ‘girl not present’ variety – where a man might, with luck, actually get so far as to meet a woman but she finds some reason why the man will not be hers. More often, the man never even travels to meet the object of his desire.
Nowadays, losers pay subscription fees to agencies to scan images of pretty girls and to ‘communicate’ with them. They get to indulge their fantasies without getting on a plane, some even end up on discussion forums with great stories of derring-do and their huge personalities, but for some reason, getting a passport is beyond them…
Today, I think the guys, by and large, who actually manage to get a woman to export herself to their home country are not ‘losers’ in personality terms. They may end up as losers when their relationship turns out to be not quite as advertised when mediated by an interpreter on a sales commission but that is another story.
Many men that do make the trip will fall victim to scams and/or to women with agendas not conducive to a happy family. The internet-dating scheme is an equal opportunity for dummies.
Even so, there are still ample numbers of good FSU women who will seek to expand their dating pool to include foreigners; if you know where and how to look. If a woman is bright enough to think outside the box, if she has enough to offer in the looks department, as well as the shrewdness, holds herself in high esteem, she can usually “sell” the deal to a pretty good guy.
For a man with above average good looks, intelligence, education, and income, there is the above average possibility he can cash in on those attributes and win for himself a much better mate in the FSU than he could hope for amongst the local bovine beauties. Here I am specifically referring to the educated, professional, divorced man over 35-40, with a bad marriage or two well behind him.
As we contemplate this, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands of beautiful FSU women already happily married to such westerners. They are raising families, enjoying careers, having Christmas parties, making friends, and are not at all concerned with the negativity that surrounds the whole “mail order bride” industry. They are I think, mostly pretty happy with their decision to move abroad. They have improved their life possibilities immeasurably and bagged a good husband too.
Predominantly, we read of problems and trials, and even some braggarts showing their ignorance, but not successes. Success stories don’t breed long and hotly debated news stories. Therefore, it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. There seems to be an enormous supply of chaff on the internet about so called “mail order brides” and very little real grain.
Getting a wife from a foreign facing mail order bride agency is NOT akin to dating. One needs superb up to date advice about using the services of agencies and other assistants to mediate the business of getting a spouse.
However, even if a foreign man is ‘above average’ in a foreign land, finding a woman willing to meet and move country is NOT easy. Most women – average or not – simply have no interest in foreign men. Ten or fifteen years ago, Russia was on the brink of bankruptcy and even a noodle brain could see that one might do better abroad. Situations and attitudes are different now.
Women and men are seeking a package, as much as they can get for as little as they can offer. The package contains many things, security, money, respect, freedom to grow, standard of living, sexual attraction and out of those things, love might be expected to grow. Love does not exist in a vacuum, there are reasons why we love and some of those reasons are mentioned.
The balance of the list may change from person to person and both men and women will compromise upon both the balance and value of the package.
Remember that among most of the women you meet in agencies, at least the ones actually planning to marry some relatively unknown foreign dude, you are the rich guy, even if you do not think you are. YOU are why they are in the agency, to make their lives better, more comfortable, more secure and if everything goes well she will come to love you.
Richer people fall in love faster than poor people do because love is a self-actualization aspect of our personality. We “rich” folks already have the rest of the stuff: food, housing, education, satisfying work, leisure and the ability to use it. Poor folks do not, so they must be satisfied that these needs are met and then love can grow.
Really, we have only scratched the surface of the topic in this article. If you are a man considering a Russian, Ukrainian or former Soviet Union wife, you need quality information from people who have been there, done that and got the t-shirt.
