Since the OP is requesting personal experiences, this is better suited to IMHO than GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I’ve had people in real life ask how the hell I met my wife, I’m from the USA and she is from Trinidad. We met in a chat channel on WinMX in 2002 which was a P2P program that rose to prominence after Napster was taken down. She was correcting some idiots foolish nonsense and I got a laugh out of it.
We started talking and chatting, which graduated to VOIP calls PC to PC and sharing still pics and voice and video chat. I remember the first time I heard her voice her accent was so charming and unique:) Ditto for still pics and videos. I found myself wanting to get home to talk to her, blowing off friends. I bought a bluetooth earpiece and adapter for my PC so when I was home I could walk around while talking to her for free using a PC to PC VOIP program. Shit I’d leave the connection running all night, we exchanged lots of small gifts like she would send me local snacks like channa and I’d send her double stuff oreos which she loved but were not available locally at the time.
I came to Trinidad in 2004, we got married around three months later. Still married and we have a son.
EDIT: I get a kick out of the Trinidadians who tell her she won the jackpot marrying a American and similar stuff, and WTF is she doing not having gotten permanent residency in the USA yet?! The funny thing is they seem to assume a power dynamic in our relationship that is not even close to reality, I WISH I could shut down arguments with hey you won the lottery marrying me 
LOL Yea right!
I am American (with a Canadian mother), my wife is from Cote D’Ivoire. She was studying here. We met at the Smithsonian Air and Space museum in Washington DC, though we had arranged this meeting at an online dating site.
I lived in Berlin for many years - and met literally hundreds of Americans who lived there as well.
One couple moved there together, but all the rest of the Americans had moved there on their own and, surprise surprise, all of them met Germans and were married/living together there. One friend married an East German (back when the Wall was up) and she moved to the West, another married a Russian woman who was also living in Berlin at the time.
I taught at a private school in Switzerland with mostly American teachers who would come there every summer, and almost all of them had spouses/partners from Italy, Germany, Spain or UK, etc. - depending upon where they lived during the rest of the year.
In college, I had a sociology professor who said, "Never marry for money - go where the money is and marry for love!’ He had done that - saved up, moved to Monte Carlo, hung out for a few months, met lots of nice women, met one and fell in love with her. They got married, yes she was rich, and moved back to the US. They had the biggest, most expensive house on campus.
The point of that story is you can meet the love of your life at the Walmart two blocks away from where you live. Good for you. Or you can move to some place where you meet other kinds of people and fall in love there as well. Location, location, location.
I am not married to a foreign spouse, but I know several people who are.
Two cases involve military postings (Canada and Philippines).
Two cases involved someone who work all over the world (one in fishing, one in computers).
Another case met while one was here on a student visa - they were both in college.
Russian, married to an American here. We met on an online game in the late 90s, after I’ve already moved to the states.
My late husband was a Brit, and we met here on the SDMB.
My husband is from India; I’m American. He came to the U.S. for college, where we met, though we didn’t start dating until after we both graduated. We were in the same circle of friends, then lost touch for a bit, then bumped into each other at a movie theater. We’ve been married for eight years now, together for 11 and have two kids.
I met my Ukrainian wife on the Internet in 1999 and we were married in the US the next year. My American father met my Italian mother when he was stationed in Italy with the US Army in the early 1950’s. So there is a sort of family tradition building here…
I was living in Viet Nam working for IBM and my wife was working for one of IBM’s business partners when I first met her. We started dating over there, and now we’re married and both live in the U.S. It’s pretty common for ex-pats in Viet Nam to have local girlfriends. Many end up marrying and either staying there permanently or bringing their wives back to their home countries.
It’s also pretty common for a couple to start an overseas relationship, sometimes based on an introduction from the woman’s overseas relatives. I even heard of couples where the man couldn’t speak any Vietnamese and the woman couldn’t speak English, so all their correspondence had to be translated. I couldn’t really understand how that would work though.
I’m American and my husband is German. We live in Germany, so I guess I’m the foreign spouse. We’ve been married for just over 16 years now.
We met through work. He worked for my company’s German parent company and came over to us for 6 months.
I’m American and my wife is Brazilian. We met at work, here in the US, at a restaurant where I was waiting tables and she was working in the kitchen.
She didn’t speak much English and I didn’t know any Portuguese, so I bought a couple of grammar books and learned enough to start chatting with her and ask her out. We’ve now been married 16 years.
That is precisely what my Ukrainian fiancee, then wife, and I had to deal with. We knew only one or three words in each others languages. We used a translating calculator or PC software to translate much of the first year, although during our courtship I paid to have her letters and mine translated for us. Once she arrived in the USA she began to learn English in earnest by simple immersion. She also took ESL classes, which helped greatly. What slowed her down was when I finally got Russian satellite TV for her and she stopped watching American TV. It slowed her language learning but probably prolonged her respect for American culture, since she was no longer watching soaps and Jerry Springer to learn about America.
We still joke that the first year of marriage, when she only knew to say “yes” in English, was the best year ever.
PS During our courtship we exchanged more than 300 emails, from which we learned darn near everything about each other. It helps that we both communicate well in writing.
Met my Japanese “spouse” (gay relationship for 20 years, not legally married) here, in person. He had lived at various places in the U.S. already for almost 20 years, but still definitely very Japanese. He was on the rebound, I was available, bingo bango we were a couple.
Roddy
I love these stories, so very charming!
All I can think of is the scene from Love, Actually when the Brit asks the Portugese 'You learned english for me?" and she replies “Just in cases”
I think, sometimes accidentally say, ‘just in cases’ all the time now. I should be learning spanish considering where I live, and the fact that I cannot work even for the DMV because I don’t speak it, but my husband’s family knows english better than most americans I know, as does just about everyone around here, and though MrTao knows more spanish than he lets on, he plays dumb when people who don’t know him start speaking spanish automatically to him, so…I still should get with Rosetta Stone at least. Just in cases.
I’m American and my wife is Panamanian (Does Panama meet your criteria for ‘foreign’?).
I met my wife in the late '80s at Macy’s Herald Square in NY. I was one of the floor managers in the ladies shoes department on the 6th floor, and she was a seasonal employee.
Although I managed the schedules of all the part-timers in ladies shoes, the only thing that stood my wife apart was her very noticeable Spanish accent. I never thought about whether or not I was attracted to her because, other than having to pull cash from her drawer for hourly drops, I rarely interacted with her.
One day, after New Years, when meetings were being held to determine which seasonal employees to cut and which to keep, she pulled me aside and asked if she could discuss something with me. I immediately suspected an attempt on her part to make a case to be among those to be kept on. My suspicion was wrong. She’d been interested in me for weeks, and was dropping hints all over the place that I was completely oblivious to. Long story short, we began to date.
For our first date, we went to a restaurant called Beefsteak Charlie’s. The food was horrible.
My wife did all the heavy lifting in our relationship for the first year or so. It took quite some time for me to come around to the idea of permanence and sharing and planning for a future. If she hadn’t been so single-mindedly persistent and determined in that first year, we wouldn’t be together today; I certainly didn’t make it easy for her. Now, after over 22 years of marriage, it is very unpleasant to contemplate the possibility of life without her.
I am American and my husband is from Switzerland.
He was recently divorced (from his Swiss wife) and wanted a total change, so he decided to do a post-doc at the University of Texas. I was a graduate student there. One hot summer day we both decided to go inter-tubing down the river to cool off. We met, dated, married, had 4 kid, etc etc.
I’m not married to a foreigner, but my father is. He met my mother (his wife) doing missionary work.
My uncle (who is in his early 80s) is currently married to a Chinese woman who is about half his age.
After he retired, he began to travel, and became infatuated with Asia, and China in particular. At about that same time, he and my aunt acted as host families for several Chinese exchange students. He and my aunt (who were married for 40+ years) got divorced, mostly because he was apparently pursuing several romantic leads among the Chinese women he’d met.
He met the Chinese woman whom he married during one of his vacations in China; I don’t know the exact details of how they met. She runs a business in Shanghai (her company helps Chinese college students locate American universities to attend), and they split their time between Shanghai and the U.S.
Was talking to a former teacher at my old HS today. His wife is Argentine.