mail-order brides still exist.
Did you think mail order brides were a thing of the past? A tired old trope relegated to downtrodden damsels in distress in ramshackle countries, preyed upon by any jerk who could scrape together the money to nab the bride of his choice?
You may be surprised to learn that international marriages facilitated by brokers and dating sites are more common than you think, and they’re not always the tawdry affair they’re made out to be.
As with most things in the world, these relationships are more nuanced and multifaceted than they appear at first glance. Sure, horror stories of fraud and abuse abound, and we’ll explore those too in this two-part look at a world most of us have only begun to scratch the surface of.
Those gold nuggets were nice, but they weren’t much for company.
How did placing an ad for a wife or husband become a reality? there are instances of the practice going back to the 19th century, when life on the American frontier was lonely for men trying to make their way in the unsettled west.
“Hello, friends! Did you bring any women?” image via g.f. nesbitt & co./wikipedia.
The discovery of gold on the western frontier sparked a mass migration of eager and optimistic men hoping to strike it rich. but the extreme lack of ladies was something of a drag (at least for the heterosexuals among them). American men in the West ran ads in East Coast (and sometimes other countries) newspapers and wrote letters to churches, all in the hope that there would be some single woman available who was up for adventure and working her way up. same.
and sometimes women would place their own ads:
Once he had courted her enough through their torrid pen pal relationship (can you imagine how long they had to wait for the mail?), often the man would propose to her by letter and if the woman accepted , paid him. way west.
As usual, at some point, a smart entrepreneur noticed the trend of women with limited opportunities longing for a chance at a new life and men looking for [beautiful] women. and so he took off the practice of “mail-order bride,” or as the kinder (and probably accurate) people would call it, “international marriage.” it would become, for decades, a booming industry.
fast forward to 2015.
things look very different. Instead of being forced to marry a man based on a few cards and a picture, technology has created a new dynamic. consider it match.com on steroids and with higher stakes. And to be clear, the term “mail-order bride” is a loaded, much-discussed one at that. the connotation is ugly: that a woman is a commodity that is selected almost randomly or on the basis of superficial measurements and is bought and sold with little self-agency over the transaction. while there are disreputable agencies involved in such practices around the world, in this article we will focus on more reputable outlets. these outlets often avoid the term “mail-order bride” for obvious reasons.
There are two segments to differentiate in the international relationship market: dating sites and marriage brokers. the latter is responsible for most of the tasteless concepts presented by the media, such as choosing a wife based on broad criteria and paying a sum for an intermediary to organize their union. but the former, the dating sites, are an entry point to international marriages that often fall more on the side of the conventional and with results that may surprise you. however, all too often, relationships emerging from international dating sites are conflated with “mail-order brides.”
The truth is that international dating sites are a lot more like regular online dating sites than you might think.
that’s a distinction anthony volpe is quick to make when he talks about it. volpe is the cmo of anastasiadate, one of the most popular sites in the world for men who want to meet russian women. anastasiadate began in 1993, when an American man and a Russian woman, who met and married through a matchmaking agency, decided they wanted to facilitate each other’s relationships in the same way. now they have similar sites for men who want to meet women from all over the world: amolatina, asianbeauties and africabeauties.
argues that anastasiadate probably has more in common with a traditional online dating site than an international marriage broker. He insists the company is agnostic about the kind of relationship two people embark on once they meet, and Anastasiadate is only interested in serving as a communications platform to serve many different relationship goals. volpe divides those goals into four fields; human warmth and connection, flirtation and escape, serious relationships and marriage.
I asked him about the commodification of women that can occur, as demonstrated in the international dating documentary “love translate”: in it, men continually say after a nice date with a beautiful woman that they are going to continue looking for her See if there is a better option before you settle. Volpe resisted that a bit. “if we start with the assumption that whatever a person’s ultimate goal is in dating — flirting, escape entertainment, human warmth, serious relationship, or marriage — they want to have the best possible experience when people are introduced to options, the more options they have. , in some cases, the better.”
the paralysis of too many options. gif of “translated love”.
in a way that’s true. one has to stop and wonder if the seemingly endless options can cripple someone who might be seeking idealized foreign romances due to an inability to connect in everyday spontaneous situations. but on the other hand, one also has to wonder if that dynamic is different on anastasiadate than it is on, say, tinder, or if both examples are simply emblematic of how technology can amplify shortcomings that may just be one aspect. of human nature.
volpe offers one way that your business differentiates itself from sites like match.com: its verification system. ensures that on the women’s side they have partner agencies that confirm their identity via identity card or passport. sadly, on the men’s side, they only need a credit card for verification, which calls into question exactly how balanced the dynamic really is. if the interests of both parties are not equally protected, does anastasiadate really consider both genders as their customer, or is one actually more the product?
josh and ekaterina’s story offers a glimpse into a success story for international marriages.
anastasiadate was kind enough to introduce me to a happy couple who got married after meeting on the site. their names are josh and ekaterina, who goes by kate. Josh and Kate seem to have a pretty normal relationship, if a bit dated. They hooked up in 2012 through the site, after Josh decided the dating pool in Akron, Ohio wasn’t “high quality” enough.
They quickly got serious, marrying about a year later in Ohio with a small ceremony (Josh’s parents are deceased and he has little family) and moving to the Northwest soon after. In Russia, Kate was a physical therapist, a degree she was able to obtain for free. she provided him with an independent lifestyle with a modest apartment that she was happy with; she wanted her free time and her money to travel. she was in anastasiadate, she says, not to try to solve financial problems (as the stigma around international relations implies), but because she was really looking for a life partner. josh says that americans are so convinced that this is the best country in the world that they often think that people are desperate to come to the united states no matter what, but depending on what you are valuing, in some way, life in russia is better. Kate agrees.
josh and kate on vacation. image used with permission.
Is your relationship one of equals?
When it comes to being on a level playing field financially (and economic parity often lends itself to fairness in relationships, whether we like it or not), some dynamics of America’s financial model put Kate at a disadvantage now that is here. for example, he would love to practice physical therapy here, but to get a US degree, he would have to take out a loan that he would potentially be “paying for the rest of his life” and it would take him another six-seven years to get the degree. To complicate matters, she puts her at the center of a dilemma many couples face when it comes to raising children. Josh and Kate are considering having children soon, and in the traditional values they both seem to hold dear, Kate’s education would definitely take a backseat as she takes on the role of primary caretaker for her future children. She is able to achieve some financial equity in the association through her translation work, but Josh is the main breadwinner as a programmer analyst.
still, josh is sensitive to kate’s situation (being russian in america, with some dependency on him) and wants to make sure she is an equal partner in decision making. in her words:
And Kate is pretty clear about how she likes to continue their relationship. Here’s how she explains it (in fairly good, if not perfect, English):
kate and josh’s story is incredibly interesting, and they are not alone.
There are other great international marriage stories, including some that originated from matchmaking agencies that people would be tempted to refer to as “mail order,” where couples feel safe and marriages do what they want. they make the best marriages: they make each add up to more together than they could have been separately.
The more you know about international marriages, the more questions will arise about dating in the united states.
an interesting rabbit hole of thought that came up while talking to josh and kate and anthony volpe revolves around the contrasts between american dating culture and international dating culture. Josh pointed out that in American relationships, many times people jump from one experience to the next, not knowing exactly what they are looking for, and probably still reeling from the last relationship they had. he thinks that for international dating, you have to know yourself better than that and be pretty clear about what you want. it stands to reason, if you’re going to spend thousands of dollars on travel to meet someone (and you’re not obscenely rich) that you want to be pretty efficient about it and not waste your efforts.
and the questions to explore here are almost endless. what is the motivation of men in anastasiadate to seek foreign company? is the draw an idealized hope of a woman with traditional [read: non-feminist] ways of thinking from the “old country” who will not challenge them, as they are finding some American women tend to do? and how can that result in a tragedy for women who could be easy targets for abusers? And what happens when the woman just wants a green card or to swindle a man out of money? In the follow-up article, we’ll explore some of the caveats and nightmare stories of international dating and marriage.
but in the meantime, it’s worth thinking again about your preconceived notions about international marriage arrangements.
Like everything, there are shades of gray, nuances and extremes of good and bad experiences. More often than not, technology is a tool, and how good or bad it is depends on the person using it. When you think about it like that, international marriages don’t sound that different from marriages that start from Tinder.