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Consider a typical 35-year-old unattached heterosexual U.S. male who hopes to eventually get married. One day he goes to a club in his city and finds that thousands of extremely beautiful 20 to 25-year-old Russian women in the club want to marry him. Many of these women speak English and have a college degree. True, they want to marry him in large part because of his income, but they still want to marry him. Although I have no evidence, I strongly suspect that many 35-year-old men would agree to marry one of these Russian women.
Dating websites such as this do allow an American male to pick a beautiful 20-25 year old Russian woman to marry. Yet few take advantage of this. Why not?
Maybe it’s because men fear that they will be cheated by international matchmaking organizations. But if this is true there should be a profitable market opening for a firm with a trusted brand name to start such a matchmaking operation. Google, perhaps, could extend its search services to help men find international marriage mates.
Bias against some types of foreign wives
I think a lot of people today confuse "mail order brides" with "women whom men met over the Internet."
I travel to foreign countries in my work, and have met women there, after being introduced online. I've never met a subservient woman in my life, regardless of country, so we can knock that b.s. right out. Yes, some cultures still produce homemakers, but most of our grandmothers were homemakers, and that didn't make them subservient.
The real issue is "why?" In my case, I just find foreign women attractive. I like the cultural differences, and enjoy learning about theirs and sharing my own. I'm not looking for a slave, and I'm not intimidated by American women, nor am I angry at them. I just like foreign women, especially Asian. I find them attractive. And all b.s. aside, the first thing you notice is physical attraction, unless you're in some arranged marriage or something.
What's great about the internet, and (relatively) cheap travel, is it gives everyone options. If you're not really thrilled with the gal next door / at church / at work / via friends / via Match.com, you can look elsewhere. And yeah, it is an international marketplace. Used to be local only. Things change.
As for looking to an American man for such-and-such advantages, truly consider this: Would *you* leave your home country, only to return maybe once a year, just to live with some rich guy?
If not, why would you assume a foreign woman would?
The true bias here is an assumption, mostly made by American women, that foreign women are dumb, or pure opportunists. Sure, there are those types -- in all countries. Like anything else, you have to be smart about it. Foreign does not mean better or worse -- it's just a choice, like a foreign car, or foreign beer, or anything else that you enjoy. And while I don't really compare people to cars and beer, the part about "enjoy" is honest. We should enjoy the person we're with.
This is an interesting topic for me because I am a retired military wife and former military brat. I am also a web sleuther, and that has involved numerous hunts for wives who have just suddenly gone "missing". Too many of these wives were so-called M.O.B. from Asian countries.
I grew up with foreign brides and met many of them because of the military. What set those marriages apart however, was the fact that the man and woman actually met while the man was living overseas. The relationship developed as any normal relationship would.
However, I do not think that when it comes to the marriage market involving Western Men and women from Eastern Europe and Asia, it is correct to suggest that it is society so much as too many of these men themselves who actually keep the bias against the whole idea going. If you research the issue on the net, you find that the men who are "representing", are if the display they put on the net is anything to go by, lacking in the ability to maintain a healthy relationship.
You find too many of these men are just more of "Indle King", narcissistic and some just downright sociopathic. You couple this with the media attention that is given when a MOB wife is murdered, and you then have the roots of your bias.
How can a man or woman for that matter, find true love if you haven't even bothered to learn one another's languages? How can you have even friendship if you are unable to be open to one another's cultures?
My husband and I have been married for going on thirteen years, we are both American, and both divorced, and when it comes to the hard knocks of ending marriages, "been there done that". Our marriage is successful, because we started out as good friends. We both had trust issues, were from two different walks of life, both had kids from the first marriages, but rather than overcoming those challenges so much, we strived to understand each other, and we hung on tight to one another. The "challenges" as a result of our approach were minor bumps in our road.
It is how you view marriage, and how you approach it, I think, as individuals, and as a couple, that will determine your success.
In many cases a man steps into a marriage thinking he has found a "traditional" woman. But at least for American men, what we define as traditional, and what other cultures define as traditional, are very different. In our culture a woman who nags is looked down upon. Many of you men are going to say "WRONG" but then you find yourself married to a woman from Korea, for example, and you discover what "nag" really is. We approach issues very differently in our culture. One is we talk about them. We look down upon keeping secrets from each other. We talk before we spend a specific amount of money. Many cultures do not do this. The man is the provider, you bring home your money, and your wife spends it.
If I spent my husband's military check on lobsters, he would have had a fit, and for him this would have been a betrayal, because we had to make it stretch. However, for some foreign wives, for the man to take offense, actually makes the man look very bad.
The differences seem very trivial, until you take that step, and find them to be costly.
So I side with many of the women who argue against the sincerity of a man who goes overseas for a marriage tour, and then returns with his wife. He has exchanged letters with her, through a translator, she is the one that HAS to learn his language, and he has not spent enough time with her family to even tell you what her parents look like. I also work in my freetime posting fliers, and hunting morgue databases in the hopes of finding too many wives who have just "gone missing". It makes me more leary of some of the men who look abroad, but would not so much if I did not see what sociopaths some of them really are, by reading their comments on the internet. I always end up thinking, great, soon there will be another missing wife that we will be hunting for.
The flip side to this issue is that many of these men place themselves into a dangerous situation. They marry a woman and end up dead and being one of our missing as well. We had the case of the man from Texas that married a woman from the Ukraine. He mysteriousely plunged to his death down a stairwell. The wife married the man she had introduced as her cousin, they cleaned out his bank account, and the man's adult daughter spent over a decade trying to get justice for her dad. The more recent case was the man that ended up barricading himself in his apartment with police at his door, and he ultimately killed himself after his wife from Russia left him, accused him of physical abuse to their neighbors, and while he is dead, she gets to remain in the US and do as she pleases.
The more common though is that too many well-meaning men end up being tagged as abusers because it is the only way for a foreign wife to get residency once she gets to the US if she wants to leave her new husband within a certain period of time. We had a friend that went through this after he had already gone through hell with his ex-wife. He never would have put his hands on any woman, but she turned up with bruises and had him arrested for spousal battery. We knew he didn't do it because aside form the fact that he just wasn't the type, he was with us and some other friends helping someone else out that evening. She had been mad at him because he was working on the car instead of catering to her. She told his boss he had beat her almost to death, she had him locked up, and even when it all came out in the wash, he never lived it down.
So it all comes down to the fact that if you just meet someone and marry them, you never know what your going to be getting. You will either end up with another divorce under your belt, dead and one of my missing, with an abuse label over your head, broke, or godwilling, by some miracle, living happily ever after.
This is all coupled with the weak arguements that are used to justify it. Divorce rates in the US have been in steady decline since 2000 and now sit around 42% compared to over 60% of Russian/Ukraines. The fact that women get fat. All people in the US get fat, but more men are overweight than women, CDC confirms that. Then the one about women spending more than men, wrong again, American women save more money than American men do. American women are lazy. American women spend more time working between job and home than men do by 4 hours a day. American women are whores but won't have sex. American women can not be whores and uninterested in sex at the same time. Besides, all men want a whore in the bedroom, and some women don't want a guy to need viagra to play. Touche.