I confess to being astonished by that link. How bad must things be for those women to put themselves out there (provided it’s on the up and up, I suppose).
Hell, reading from that they all want me (a getting-towards middler-aged somewhat dumpy businessman). That’s just crazy.
Frankly, I’d feel embarassed carting around one of those sweet young things on my arm. Just embarassed.
Um…
But allow me to say there’s one woman on there who’s smile would launch a thousand ships. Holy Cow.
Nothing quite beats suddenly realizing you’re the absolute sex dream of thousands of beautiful women. 
Well Jonathan, don’t expect me to pony of with any $3000. Daily trivia: apparently one in six of all marriages in Scandinavia was hatched at one of these marriage sites. Now I know why.
Not to piss in the punch bowl, but there is a dis-stink possibility that Bubba may come home empty-handed. And you must know that the prospect of such a thing keeps me tossing and turning during the long winter nights.
The term “mail-order-bride” is misleading. There are hundreds of web sites for dating, personals, etc.
http://www.goodwife.com/asian/
http://www.svetlanaagency.com/
http://www.world-class.com/
http://www.chinese-women.com/
http://www.thaidarling.com/main.htm
http://www.chnlove.com/
http://www.obridge.com/
http://www.asiansingles.com/
http://asiafriendfinder.com/
http://www.date.com/
http://www.kiss.com/
Perhaps, at least it demeaning.
People, women especially, are often very derisive of the practise, understandable perhaps, but is it really fair? There is no reason why this can not produce healthy, loving and long lived relationships. I seem to remember some statistics stating that such marriages on average lasted longer than others.
It would be interesting to hear some thoughts on why men in such large numbers suddenly decide to marry women from abroad. Is it backlash against feminism, or just a new opportunity? Women seem not to do the same thing in any great number. What will happen to a society if immigration is so lopsided gender wise? Will this not produce a glut of unmarriageable women?
If Russian men really are so bad as rumoured, which I still very much doubt, these men are bound to be marrying the cat in the sack! I have a very hard time believing a society producing people where only one gender is god-awful – the women are going to be just as dreadful / lovely as the men.
I think you are oversimplifying. It’s not so much that the men are ‘bad’ and the women are ‘good’, it is that the society itself may not value women in the same way that they are appreciated in a western country.
Because it’s the only way Bubba’s gonna get laid, Duh!
Go buy yourself a Russian girl to do your thinking Unwashed. Bubba might be a large, but I think it’s a stretch to call him a large number. Duh!
Is duration your primary criterion for evaluating the success of a marriage? Because people stay in marriages for all kinds of unhealthy reasons, and leave them for all sorts of good ones.
I keep hoping that if the imbalance becomes great enough, Russian men will be forced to behave better in order to find a woman. Alcoholism and spousal abuse are very serious problems there. And when I went to my consular briefing during my first stay in Ruussia, the women in my group were told to be very, very careful around men we didn’t know well, especially with alcohol involved, because the Russian legal system is such that it is practically impossible to prosecute acquaintance rape. Basically, if you knew they guy, the prosecutors would almost never believe that the sex wasn’t consensual.
(Oh, **sailor, ** that’s an awful lot of research you’ve done there! 
)
Duh! That was a generic Bubba, Smith.
But maybe you have a point – there could be a market for Russian girls to do ones thinking. Do you suppose, eh?
At our weekly basketball game there’s a high school kid whose mother was a mail-order bride. We call him “Postage Stamp”. I’d feel sorry for all the teasing this kid goes through if he wasn’t such a jackass himself.
My brief research into meeting women from the former soviet socialist republic revealed one codicil that I thought was a deal breaker. In the paperwork involved in bring someone into the US for marriage, I believe there is a document that makes the ‘importer’ liable for the ‘importees’ expenses for 10 years, regardless if you stay married or not.
I don’t believe that is the case anymore byter. My husband and I are about to go for our INS interview for him, and in all the paperwork, I don’t recall reading anything like that. Of course, my brain could just be farting and I could be completely wrong!
Doesn’t stop you from yelling “stunt double!”
Seriously, if the gender ratios get too skewed we’ll have to make polygamy legal. 
Hey, Steve Railsback ain’t been workin’ much lately.
Me too, Jonathan. However, if it came right down to it, there’s a couple of them that I could probably, ummm, make the ultimate sacrifice and adjust for. Yeah, I could probably learn to live with the embarrassment.
I think you’re thinking of the Form I-864, Affidavit of Support. You aren’t liable for supporting them strictly speaking, but that means yor income is taken into account when they apply for public benefits for 10 years, until they are credited with 40 quarters of employment for Social Security purposes, they die, they leave the U.S. permanently, or become U.S. citizens, whichever comes first.
(I don’t deal with these often, so I don’t know the ins and outs of them, but that’s the general idea.) This form is required for almost all family-based green card cases.
Some thoughts speaking in very general terms. Some considerations first:
1- Women tend to marry upwards in every society. They like the security that money and power bring.
2- Men are more interested in physical appearance than women and they like young women.
3- People in western societies, in general terms, have become more spoilt in the last few generations. We want to be pleased and we want it now. We have a feeling of entitlement. We deserve to be pleased. Marriage has become a matter of “love” when just a few generations ago it was very much a matter of teeming up to better deal with life together. Amking it be a matter of love means that we feel that it is something over which we have no control; love disappears and the best thing is to break up. We have lost any sense of responsibility or obligation. We want our pleasure first and we want it now.
Take all of the foregoing. Now consider a typical American couple who got married relatively young and after some years of marriage have found out they are sick and tired of each other. They expected everything to be hunky dory in their love life but it did not turn out that way and they were not prepared to deal with the difficulties. Instead of working hard to stay together and make things work, every thing done wrong by one partner leads to the other one retaliating which leads, soon and inevitably, to a bitter divorce. Sometimes we may find fault clearly on one of the partners but many times we can see they both just did not work hard at making things work out because they thought marriage was supposed to work out by itself.
So they get divorced. The guy is 45 and bitter about women who he sees as spoiled; who are demanding much and give little in return. Furthermore, he is looking at dating women who are like his exwife: already past prime at age 40, divorced, a couple of kids and emotional baggage. He finds that there is an alternative in other cultures where womens expectations are more realistic and where age difference is not an impediment as it is in the USA. He can befriend a younger woman (more physically attractive to him), who is less demanding and less spoiled and she finds the security she wants. If the guy has matures and learnt from his first mistake, that second marriage will work out very well. His wife appreciates what he does for her and that encourages him to do more. I have seen men marry foreign women and adopt their children and they were wonderful fathers to those kids. Of course, if the guy was an asshole to begin with, that will not change and this marriage will not last either.
Divorced women over 40 face a very different situation as is obvious. They are still looking upwards and everything works against them. Men have the option of finding brides in other countries so that shrinks the pool. Men die sooner so that shrinks the pool even more. Men seem to place less importance on love life and a more willing to stay single and find fulfilment in other things like work or golf. Women over 40 have it tough and some of them have a bitterness and an attitude about men which does not help them.
Not that I am any fan of either of the Clintons but I have to give them one thing and that is that they have a pretty solid family by American standards. They have put the welfare of their daughter ahead of political considerations several times and when the Monica affair many feminists were saying the thing for her to do was divorce him but I think she did the right thing. I think their decision to stay together was ultimately for the best of all three. Marriage is sticking out together even if you have to call your husband to order and if he is a decent guy (and Bill, ultimately, like most men, is a decent guy in that respect) he will come to order. Divorce him and you just gave him license to do what he was already doing.
Just a couple years ago my cousin married a chzech girl a bit younger than his own daughter some people in the family were not quite happy about it but I can understand him perfectly. His ex-wife was very demanding and he got tired of that. Now he has a wife who thinks he is so nice and so great and who is as pretty as his ex-wife was 25 years ago. He found her in the Chzech Republic but it is close to impossible that he would have found a similar person willing to marry him in the USA. Most girls of his daughter’s age would say EWWW!
There was a TV newsmagazine (20/20?) just a few years back about foreign brides. There were cases were they were, indeed abused by assholes but there are also laws to protect such women from deportation if they divorced so that they were not forced by circumstances to stay married. There were many, probably most, cases of happy marriages which worked out well probably because, as I said, the man had matured and the woman was less demanding. The feminists were furious. They saw is as men abusing young women, getting houseservants etc. One of the husbands, when asked about this said he did not understand why feminsts would have a problem. His wife was happy, he was happy, what was wrong with that?
Finally, regarding Russian men, I do not know if they are as bad as they are depicted by some but the bad economy probably means the women find more security in foreign men so. . . Russian men just go and get drunk, which makes things even worse. It is probably also the culture and the dark and cold days of winter. Also in some TV newsmagazine I saw a piece about Finland and it struck me that the woman all said the men were awful as far as drinking in excess. I remember one woman said it was a good date if the man didn’t vomit. Talk about having to lower your standards.
Generic Bubba huh? Well that’s way clever. Bugger that! Your Russian girl is smarter than mine! Gotta upgrade!
But…but…but…
Shouldn’t Bubba have been uncapitalized if used in a generic way (bubba)? (honest question from someone not blessed with English as a mother tongue. Sigh Had that just been an English mail order mom.)
So your theory is that all mail order marriages (so called) come about because the men are unable to get pussy any other way? Well that’s a hmmm very hmmm… bold theory. Hmmm… I think.
Don’t know. 
Have to consult my Russian girl on that one.