Ban "imports of brides," you say?

Okay, I’ll be nice and won’t accuse the author of this inanity of being unloved, dropped on her head from a great height, or of coming from a different universe than one with at least one intelligent species.

What I will do is quote one comment of hers that made me read the article a couple of more times to ensure that I wasn’t dreaming the words therein.

Bizarre? Did you say it’s a bizarre act to decide to marry someone you happen to fall in love with? And, it may have escaped your notice, but some countries actually do have what’s called an education system. And some of those places, believe it or not, actually outshine places in the US.

The article is really about the ills of internet-based international matchmaking services. The writing of the article, though, shed a bit more light than the author obviously intended–and I’m not talking about the light shed on those services.

What a twat; she’s equating ‘foreigner’ with someone who is ‘guaranteed to be less well educated and a lot less well off financially’.

Yeah I can’t gather up much vitriol on this one (busy day) but I agree she’s a racist whorebag.

Maybe you should read the article again because they’re talking about the typical brides one gets from a mail order bride service and not foreigners in general. Monty, she’s not saying it’s bizarre to want to marry a foreign woman, but it’s bizarre for a man to deliberately seek out women who are impoverished and likely less educated than themselves to make into a wife.

Hey, Freudian, how is this woman a racist?

Marc

My Ex was from Latin America. She was (and is) worth about thirty million US.

That must’ve been some ritzy catalogue!

sorry :slight_smile:

Sorry, I misread some of the article.

Don’t mind me, but I still can’t say I agree with her.

I parse the quote differently:

“Someone from a foreign country who is just about guaranteed to be less well-educated” is the subject. Not that anyone from a foreign country is necessarily going to be all those things, but that mail-order brides most likely will be, and it’s those marriages are incurably unhealthy etc. etc. Not “marrying someone from a foreign country, who is less well-educated, creates an unhealthy power imbalance”, but “marrying someone from a foreign country who is less well-educated creates an unhealthy power imbalance”. Am I making sense? Does anyone else pick up on that distinction?

I find the whole idea of mail-order brides to be extremely creepy. I understand wanting to have a wife. I understand the desperate loneliness associated with years of not getting one. What I don’t understand is buying someone who you barely know, with the anticipation of spending the rest of your life with her. It’s like overseas adoption and prostitution combined.

I live in China and during my weekly forays to the local US Consulate I see many a couple preparing paperwork in order to tie the knot. I’ve yet to see a union in which both sides are equal in financial resources or worldly experience. When pairing up a 20 something female(Chinese) with a 50-ish retiree(American) it escapes me how you can objectively call this an equal relationship. In almost every case the romance has taken place entirely in the digital realm over an extremely short courtship period. Add the fact that conversation is extremely limited due to language constaints and what you have on one side is a male usually wanting a nubile body and deferential attitude and a female wanting out of the country. Not exactly foundations for a long-term relationship.

That’s how I read it too, due to the lack of a comma after “country.”

I’m having a hard time figuring out what in the fuck has the OP’s panties in a twist. How does one fall in love with a “mail-order bride” when the people to be married barely know each other or haven’t even met prior to the nuptials? And what is so inaccurate about the likely status and education differential between the future bride and the husband who essentially bought her?

There’s a guy my brother hangs out with who married a Mexican girl
His brothers did as well. Obviously the merits of marrying Mexican was discussed in that family. Its not like we have a lot of Mexicans up here in Canada. Well I tell you he is really the king of the roost at his home, because every time I get to meet his wife, she dotes on him. He is very happy, she’s about 50 years old right now and she looks about 20. He knows he’s got a good thing going there, and he supports her frequent trips to Mexico to visit family. Considering this fellow is into a lot of guy things like hot rods and male bonding it is amazing to see the love and respect they have for each other. You just don’t see that degree of female doting on her man by middle aged Canadian women.

If your a Canadian male and you really really want to be looked after like a king, I expect you’ll have to look for a thirld world woman.

Are these the same sorts of people who think men who help out equally with household chores and let their wives have careers are faggots?

You’d think, but there are a great many men out there who have married your basic domestic female and are pretty damed upset when she makes more money or has more education than he does.

That’s “damned,” though “damed” is nice, too. So much for edumacation.

I don’t. Marrying for love is a relatively new notion for humanity. For most of human history, we married whomever our parents chose for us, sometimes meeting them for the first time at the altar. Back then, we didn’t have the option of divorce if it didn’t work out.

:confused:

I think she’s completely missing the point.

Sure, I find the concept of mail-order brides repugnant and demeaning, but the woman involved does get, at a very minimum, a noticeable improvement in financial circumstances.

Also, once the women involved are on American (or Canadian, or what have you) soil, they have a host more rights and resources than they used to. If their husbands are abusive, misogynistic bastards, they can press charges. Even the most “ignorant” immigrant - especially if legal - can get themselves educated and employed in a big hurry.

I suspect that many of the women involved are very realistic about the trade off. Some of them win the sweepstakes with a loving partner. Others have to slog through difficult circumstances, but they have far, far more possibilities than they used to. Marriage, in this instance, is not the end of these women’s lives. It’s the beginning.

Okay, caveats first:

None of this information is current in the social context sense, because it is all about people I first knew thirty years ago. The people themselves are exceptional in a number of ways, and may not be representative of population averages then, or now.

I only ever met one “mail order bride” in my life. She married a guy I knew in college. He was a sweet, shy, brilliant man, with absolutely no social graces. She was a Cambodian. (Think about Cambodia in the nineteen seventies.) He answered an ad in a not quite pornographic meet an Asian woman magazine of the period. They exchanged three letters each, over less than six months. He agreed to pay her passage to Canada, which had more amenable laws for immigration at the time. He went to Canada to meet her. They got married, and moved back to the US.

She was a dutiful and subservient spouse, with fear in her eyes, and her head habitually bowed. He was absolutely enthralled by the fact that she was stunningly beautiful, and seemed to fairly worship him. Ten years went by. She got her Masters in Business Administration. She had three children, girls, all just beautiful, all smart, all getting fantastic grades in school, and all just deferential to their dad, but downright brassy to the rest of the world. He was still doing whatever utterly secret thing he did for whatever very quiet branch of the US Government it is that he works for. He was very happy, and believed in his deepest self that she was the entire reason that he was not a desperate, lonely, and probably suicidal Cave Geek.

Five years ago, the family (now five children, mostly adults) were planning to take their sailing ship back to Cambodia, on a world tour. Mom is a work at home consultant, Dad still some kind of REMF Spook. Said sailing ship is a big assed sea going thing, although I know nothing about boats. It looks expensive to me. But the thread specific thing is that they are wildly happy, she is hardly “less well educated and a lot less well off financially” than he is now, although she certainly was when the got married. Do they have real love? Hell, no one but they know if they do. But they seem to me to be as happy as any “childhood sweethearts who met at the church social” couple I know.

Understanding the nature of your own marriage is pretty tough. Making judgments of other peoples marriages is just ludicrous.

Tris

tris that was beautiful, but I cannot fathom how your story leads to your one line conclusion.