Mail-order brides: old practice still seen as new chance for a better life – for some

[umbertino]

An industry that dates back to 1614 in the US, mail-order marriages continue to be popular for women living in bleak conditions abroad, and US blue-collar men

 

 

Olga Oksman

 

Monday 11 January 2016 17.30 GMT

 

 

 

Vitalina Wilson had never planned to marry a foreign man whose language she did not speak. Nor did she plan to move 6,000 miles away from her family to a country she knew nothing about. She had a really good job in the accounting department of a large importer in her native Ukraine. She was also divorced, after marrying at 21 to a man whom she describes as “not suited to family life”. Her ex-husband had a hard time working and made things “difficult” for her, she says softly before moving on to happier topics.

 

After her divorce, Wilson tried dating in Ukraine but never clicked with anyone. A few of her friends told her about attending mixers organized by an international dating agency specializing in pairing pretty young Ukrainian women with visiting American men who would come to Ukraine for 10 days and visit three cities, attending parties with hundreds of women at each stop.

 

Wilson had never considered signing up with the service, but with none of her dates working out she figured she had nothing to lose and tagged along with her friends to a couple of parties. She left unimpressed and could not imagine dating any of the older foreign men who saw there.

 

She gave it one more chance and saw the man who would become her husband. When she saw him, she knew right away that this was the person she wanted. She walked over, said hi and quickly had to pull a translator over so they could talk. They ended up going on a few dates after that and when they went out to dinner, since they couldn’t communicate, her now husband drew pictures for her on a napkin of the city where he lived.

 

Soon it was time for him to go back to the US, and they exchanged emails and Skype names before he left. A couple of months later, he was back in Ukraine with a ring and proposal. Eight months later, Wilson was in America.

 

Fresno, California, where she now lives, proved to be full of surprises. The food was too spicy. People ate too much fast food. Everyone drove but Wilson did not have a driver’s license, so at first she would ride her bike to run errands. In the evenings her husband took her to English classes. Little things that most of us would never think of amazed her, like how clean the streets were relative to her home city of Nikolaev. Here they take away the garbage every week, she tells me, while in Nikolaev, the garbage collectors came around every two months or so, so the trash would pile up on streets, flooding the sidewalks when there was any rain or snow.

 

Despite trying to learn English as fast as she could, when she first arrived Wilson could not understand what her new husband said to her. Her marriage is better now, she says, because they can really talk.

 

Culture and language aside, her husband is also 20 years her senior, making them members of different generations. But he really cares for her and is kind and patient, she tells me. Her husband made sure she had people to socialize with, so she was not totally dependent on him, introducing her to his friends and their wives to help her make friends. They got a dog. She feels like she can be herself around him, she tells me.

 

Now that she has adjusted to life here and learned the language, she plans to go back to school this year and get her accounting degree in the US so she can go back to working in her profession. In the meantime, she has started a pet-sitting service, watching people’s cats and dogs over holidays.

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Marcia Zug is an associate professor of law at the University of South Carolina who specializes in family law. She is writing a book due out in May 2016 on the international marriage industry, called Buying a Bride: An Engaging History of Mail-Order Matches. The reason that mail-order brides continue to be popular, she tells me, is that conditions for women in some countries remain bleak, and as long as women have few prospects for a good match at home, they will look elsewhere for someone to start a family and life with.

 

When it comes to the suitors, in the US, the majority are blue-collar men who feel disenfranchised from family life, says Zug. Blue-collar men are increasingly falling out of the marriage market as blue-collar women are finding better employment prospects, higher wages and opportunities to move up in the world, says Zug. Blue-collar women have started to see these men as more of a liability than an equal partner, so the men who want to get married have started to look elsewhere.

 

But it is not just blue-collar men struggling to build and keep a family, says Jonathon Narducci, a film-maker whose documentary on the mail-order bride phenomenon,

, features Wilson. Narducci also saw plenty of middle- and upper-middle-class men, as well as wealthy men, who searched for a bride abroad. The men tend to be significantly older than the women (the entire process of finding and bringing a bride over to the US is expensive, and so younger men tend to not be able to afford it). Agencies that set up American men with foreign women charge for translation services, emails, contacts and of course tours to meet the women at socials.

 

The practice of finding mail-order brides is not a new one, and actually dates back to Jamestown in 1614, says Zug. The practice was common in the United States for a time and most people who grew up in America will remember reading in elementary school the book Sarah, Plain and Tall, about a woman who answered an ad placed by a frontier widower and his children for a wife.

 

With the advent of the internet, the practice has become easier and more widespread, says Zug, but the premise has always remained the same for the brides, she says: a chance to find a better life.

 

These days, mail-order brides come from eastern Europe, south-east Asia and China, says Zug. In the US, eastern Europe is the most popular area, in part because most suitors from the US are white and are often looking for a bride of the same race.

 

Various factors in each country drive women to leave their homes and take a chance on a virtual stranger. In the case of China, which has a shortage of women and would seem to be the last place a woman would struggle to find a match, cultural bias against divorced women or women who are older leads them to seek a partner elsewhere, says Zug. In places like Ukraine, where alcoholism and unemployment rates are high among men, and abusive relationships common, a lack of suitable matches drives women to look elsewhere. For many of these women, “an unliberated American man seems like a feminist”, adds Zug, pointing out that everything is down to perspective.

 

Finding that match can be tricky, though. The bride industry lies to both sides, says Narducci. The women are led to believe that American men don’t drink or ever cheat on their wives and never get divorced. They buy into the American dream, he says. Meanwhile, a number of the men he interviewed were looking for “a sex object”, not a partner, and did not care that the women could not talk to them because of a language barrier. The power imbalance in the relationship attracts misogynists, says Narducci, though he notes that there are men who use the service who are genuinely looking for a wife and life partner, like Wilson’s husband.

 

Finding a wife or husband who does not speak your language or understand your culture may seem strange, and marrying someone you have known for a short time may seem like a recipe for disaster, but the divorce rates for these unions are not worse than the average US marriage. It seems love really does know no borders and there is no one right way to do it.

 

 

 

Vitalina Wilson and her husband.

Photograph: supplied

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jan/11/mail-order-marriage-brides-ukraine-america-romance