Mail Order Brides
January 15, 2016 8:49 AM   Subscribe

"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."

A two part article with more information: 1. An inside look at the 'mail-order bride' industry in America — it may not be what you expect./2. The horrifying side to the 'mail-order bride' industry — some men aren't exactly looking for love.

The concerns and problems with mail order brides are well documented.
posted by josher71 (33 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
"90 Day Fiancé" became one of my guilty pleasures when I was home sick. So, so much reading between the lines.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:09 AM on January 15, 2016


Scrabbling around Amazon's depths will show you that, for women in a safe country, being a mail order bride is actually a fantasy (e.g.) On the frontier, it made demographic sense, but today a man ordering a bride is someone who has failed to relate to a woman as an equal. (These gentlemen have come out in force in the Guardian comments.)

I really hope things work out as well for Vitalia and Kate as they claim that they have. Vitalia especially seems to have a good deal of smarts and education, and hopefully she can rely on them if things go south.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:35 AM on January 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


This is a really difficult subject to address. I have some exposure to the custom: my uncle divorced in his mid-60's, and was remarried within a year to a much younger woman he met in the Ukraine through a mail-order bride service. Holidays are... awkward. Less so now than the first year, when the language barrier was enough to keep this poor woman and her two children from being able to participate, at all, in conversation over dinner, but still pretty awkward. It's pretty clear that this was not a marriage of two starry-eyed lovers, as his new wife still cringes slightly at his touch. The allusion that gets drawn to human trafficking isn't so far off--something tells me that even without a written contract, this kind of disparity in power results in a de facto understanding that this is an orderly exchange of sex for money, but an exchange made so abstractly that it could never be prosecuted.

And yet, decrying this practice as universally bad seems to be just as anti-woman a position. Awkwardness and social isolation and problematic power relations really are a better alternative than what some of the brides would otherwise be experiencing. Part of me wonders who the hell I am to judge. But then I see the same sentiment echoed elsewhere, usually couched as "well, yes, employing 9-year-old children at clothing factories for 8 cents an hour seems inhumane to US, the enlightened westerners, but it's better than they'd be doing otherwise." Which, I mean, I guess is true, but maybe the solution would be to create conditions that allow more choices than "horrible poverty" or "exploitation by wealthy Americans."

It just feels gross at every level, but I'm not able to come up with any way of doing away with the institution that won't end up hurting women with no other recourse.
posted by Mayor West at 9:35 AM on January 15, 2016 [26 favorites]


And yet, decrying this practice as universally bad seems to be just as anti-woman a position.

I feel the entire circumstance is due to anti-woman culture. Women, perhaps with children, searching for the bottom rungs of Maslow's Hierarchy in a world that devalues their efforts and existence, and men who are accustomed to shopping for their self-esteem.

Who pays when men can't relate to women, yet construct relationships with them? Women and children. This is part and parcel to "Don't Rape" advice.

Put another way, what is going on in the world that the mechanism of mail-order brides is even a valid business model? It seems like a huge anachronism fueled by male tears. /rant
posted by rhizome at 9:48 AM on January 15, 2016 [24 favorites]


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.

This makes it read like women just think blue-collar guys are losers, but coming from a blue-collar background, the guys I know who were actually, like, decent to women and capable of helping with laundry? Those guys never had any trouble being seen as "equal partners", even with crappy jobs. Lots of college grads these days have crappy jobs. It's not the crappy job that makes you seem like not a good pick.

I wouldn't want this practice banned or anything; I just dislike phrasing it like "women are too picky" instead of like "some men want to have all the benefits of a wife without any of the shared responsibilities or emotional maturity". The stuff the first story references as virtues shouldn't be worth mentioning because they should really just be the bare-minimum expectations. He let her get a dog! He let her have friends! If this is the best that can be said of the man, there's a reason he didn't have much luck with women who spoke his language, and that it's not unreasonable for a woman to want better. This sells out the ability of working-class men to be decent partners for the sake of excusing the ones that aren't.
posted by Sequence at 9:51 AM on January 15, 2016 [61 favorites]


The Blue Collar angle has some validity I think. Traditionally men are much more amenable to "marrying down" (in terms of income and education) than women. This is many generations of societal conditioning about who should be the provider etc... Now that women attend, and graduate, college at a greater rate than men we'll probably see an acceleration of the Blue Collar male alienation until we come to grips with the idea of men not having to be the "breadwinner". #NotAllMen #NotAllWomen
posted by MikeMc at 10:01 AM on January 15, 2016 [5 favorites]


I just saw this couple on the flight back to Finland a few days ago. Like Mayor West, I noted her cringe when he pawed her (yes, exactly that) but I wasn't sure. She has had a child by him. And she's from somewhere in South East Asia. He's at least 30 years older and I'm guessing Finnish. The child cements her position and is her retirement investment. Is life in Finland any better, I wondered, than warm sunny wherever, or is there a clearer exchange of funds being sent back home to her family as well?
posted by infini at 10:09 AM on January 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


There was one couple on the TV show I linked to above, where the young man was from an extremely conservative Christian family, and I was certain that the mail-order bride was more of a mail-order beard.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:14 AM on January 15, 2016 [9 favorites]


I wonder if the book addresses the flip side of the mail-order bride -- the ex-pat husband. Very common in the Philippines and Thailand to see retirement-age white guys who have moved to there, marry younger women from subsistence farming / laboring class backgrounds, and become (basically) the odd-but-rich uncle to his wife's huge extended family.

Seems in many respects a lot more egalitarian -- wife doesn't have to give up her family or community or language, husband has to adapt himself to same -- but on the other hand the ex-pat husbands aren't subject to property division, spousal support or child support liability if the marriage ends in the same manner as they would if they'd moved their wife back home with them.
posted by MattD at 10:50 AM on January 15, 2016 [6 favorites]


Well, and if we're sharing anecdotes, I had a student who was in the US as a mail order bride. I was all prepared to alert the social services for an extraction but... she actually liked her marriage and her husband. She was regarding it as a mutual agreement, she was very smart and clear-eyed about the trade, she was happy, she was glad to be at school and in the US, she had lots of reasonable and attainable life-plans with her husband, more than most Americans do, in my experience, and I never heard her complain about being ill-treated. I never met her husband, but he didn't sound like a monster when she talked about him.

There are lots of types of marriage in the world, and love matches aren't the only or always the best model.

There's definitely the potential for exploitation, sure, and it's certainly an outlet for certain men to avoid taking a good hard self-look, but we might as identify that there are ways women can use this to take power, considering that's what the whole second article is about.
posted by arabelladragon at 10:54 AM on January 15, 2016 [13 favorites]


He was 65 and had a failed career behind him, worked as a security guard and as a salesman, has a couple of medical issues that will only get worse over time. So he found a bride in China.
She was 40 with a daughter and a career as an accountant. She wanted her daughter to have an American upbringing/college. He wanted company and assistance as he got older, someone to help cook and clean hopefully.
They both had conditions on the marriage - his were that they both learn ESL as soon as possible, learn to drive, to not inhibit the immigration process, and to go to work as soon as it was legal. Hers were that he pay for her daughter's first year of school, all of their immigration expenses, a reasonably nice home in a decent neighborhood, and buy her a reasonable car. She also wanted regular trips back to China to see her parents. So they made a deal.
By mutual agreement, theirs is not a sexual relationship. They have separate bedrooms.

A year into it he had a stroke and their means were reduced by a fair bit. She basically had to take control of his affairs. She was not happy about this and told him so regularly and at volume.

Ten years later and -

The daughter got her college degree, married a doctor and went back to China. She never learned ESL, just enough to get through school. She and the stepdad never got along.

The mother moved them to a (very) Chinese enclave/apartment complex, has still not learned much English, and has a small career working part time as an accountant. She is a year away from becoming a citizen. She has said to me that as soon as he dies, she's moving back to China.

He does most of the housework - she refuses, literally. He calls me to go get a burger once in a while so he can get some American food (she won't cook American food, but does cook most of the meals). The lack of English has been a major strain on their friendship, because he has no affinity for languages and as hard as he tries (has taken classes), Chinese is difficult for him. He's a very gentle, easy going guy - I know he treats her well and treated her daughter well, while she was here.

So I don't know. By the terms of their "deal", has it all worked? I don't think so. But he's reasonably happy, she has a plan and lots of friends and seems happy, and they have adjusted. So who am I to judge? I think it's a good arrangement for them both, honestly.

Has he "failed to relate" to her as an equal? Hell no. He fully knew she was her equal (and better) well before the marriage. He and I would talk regularly about how he wanted to pick her brain about ideas and have a good conversational partner. That's not happened, and imho that's her fault, not his. Her refusal to learn English is baffling to me.

To me, it comes down to the individuals and the arrangements they make. If it's mutually beneficial, it seems to me there's nothing wrong with an arranged marriage,vas long as it's arranged by the two involved, and not outsiders.
posted by disclaimer at 11:08 AM on January 15, 2016 [9 favorites]


OK, if it's story time... An elderly friend of mine--she's dead now, but was born in 1899--had an interesting life story. Her mother was a teenage mail order bride from Scotland bound for Provo, UT. On the boat over she met another young woman, also headed for Provo, whose contract was with a gentleman with the same name. Cousins named after a common ancestor, they assumed, and much merriment ensued during the long journey west about how they would know which bride was intended for which guy, and what they would do if one turned out to be more kind, handsome, prosperous, etc. Of course you see where this is going, and the two young women were very surprised by certain tenets of the Church of Latter Day Saints. Each had several children by the man, who later died when my friend was about 6. The two women joined households--there were also other wives, but they aren't germane to how my friend grew up--and raised their children together. Neither ever remarried, and there was some family scuttlebutt that they ultimately became partners (a theme also explored using some of the secondary characters in Big Love, minus the husband's death). They were poor, but my friend had only happy memories of her childhood and remained a committed Mormon all her days.
posted by carmicha at 11:15 AM on January 15, 2016 [12 favorites]


There are lots of types of marriage in the world, and love matches aren't the only or always the best model.

I wish this was more front and center. There are a lot of possible options, and the more that people are able to choose what suits their situation and desires, the better. A lot of people have to make choices from very constrained options, and while in a perfect world their choices would be less constrained, there is still value in making the best choice from what is available.

I wonder if the book addresses the flip side of the mail-order bride -- the ex-pat husband.

When I was working overseas I saw this and its corollary, where the expat worker, service member, or tourist meets and marries a local person and then brings them back to the US, Canada, UK, etc. I saw some of those relationships that looked from the outside to be purely transactional, and others that appeared to be completely based on love, but only the people involved would really know.

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.

That was really interesting, and I wish it wasn't just dropped in at the end of the article. There are a lot of possibilities for why this might be (from people feeling trapped to these matches being overall quite good) and it made me want to know more about the dynamics involved.
posted by Dip Flash at 11:18 AM on January 15, 2016 [5 favorites]


disclaimer, regarding language, I find it interesting you don't extend the woman the same courtesy that you extend the man. He, you say, has no affinity for languages. Perhaps she doesn't either? English isn't exactly an easy language for a Chinese speaker to learn, any more than Chinese is for an English speaker.
posted by sotonohito at 11:26 AM on January 15, 2016 [16 favorites]


It's baffling because that was part of their agreement.
posted by Melismata at 11:30 AM on January 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


Yeah, things like this plus remarks like these:
"The daughter got her college degree, married a doctor and went back to China. She never learned ESL, just enough to get through school. She and the stepdad never got along."
"Her refusal to learn English is baffling to me."
"It's baffling because that was part of their agreement."


It's like... y'all do realize that women are people, right. The daughter is her own person. The woman took ESL classes and still hasn't learned it, just like the man has taken Chinese classes and not learned Chinese. At 40, I forgive anyone who thinks they can easily pick up a foreign language and then realizes they can't.

Anyway, back to basics, women are human individuals with their own quirks. Like humans. Because they are.
posted by fraula at 11:34 AM on January 15, 2016 [18 favorites]


There's definitely the potential for exploitation, sure, and it's certainly an outlet for certain men to avoid taking a good hard self-look

Well, let's be clear: you never hear about the guy moving to where the bride lives.
posted by rhizome at 11:34 AM on January 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


Wait, I thought the daughter took ESL classes.
posted by josher71 at 11:50 AM on January 15, 2016


Well, let's be clear: you never hear about the guy moving to where the bride lives.

It's right up there in MattD's comment.
posted by clawsoon at 12:03 PM on January 15, 2016 [7 favorites]


Makes me think of Charlotte Lucas's speech in Pride and Prejudice, where she says that happiness in marriage is purely a matter of chance and that it's better to know as little as possible about the defects of the person you're going to spend your life with. She marries Mr. Collins even though he's a pompous twit, and when Lizzie goes to visit her she sees that Charlotte does very well.

Charlotte chose to "settle". It's a tragedy, but it's the sort of tragedy where life goes on and the person suffering the most still feels they did the right thing.
posted by elizilla at 12:13 PM on January 15, 2016 [5 favorites]


It's baffling because that was part of their agreement.

Also, she moved to an english speaking country... where he already was.

If he had moved to china and refused to learn chinese plenty of people would be giving him garbage cans of rightly deserved shit, but often when the tables are turned it's like oh people haev unreasonable expectations?

I don't fully understand how that's internally consistent, and i've seen both opinions be popular on here and just in general.
posted by emptythought at 12:19 PM on January 15, 2016 [5 favorites]


My children's great, great grandmother, was a mail order bride from Wales, who went to Provo, Utah, to marry a Congregationalist minister. The wedding night was not to her liking so they never engaged in intimacy again, though they stayed married. The pair adopted two sisters, and one family member said that the sisters were from the worst sort of people (she would not elaborate.) One of the two sisters was this woman's mother. Dang, some harsh talk there! Out of the mail order marriage, way down the line, I got some wonderful children.

I recently read an article about Ukrainian women who move to Utah as mail order brides, stating the men here are nicer, hard working, and honest. So things can always be worse.
posted by Oyéah at 12:36 PM on January 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


Once the wife arrived in the U.S., he tried to sign the mom up for ESL classes. She refused, specifically. She doesn't want to learn English, she doesn't think it's necessary. He doesn't have any recourse about it - he shrugs it off. I don't think he thinks it's worth a divorce or anything.

They struggle with communication some, but they seem okay with it, there are enough English-speaking Chinese (and vice versa) in their community that getting someone to translate isn't difficult, either. The daughter took enough ESL to get through school, and she translated a fair bit for her mom and stepdad when she was here.
posted by disclaimer at 1:37 PM on January 15, 2016


It's possible the woman from China tried learning ESL, but found it much harder than she thought it would be, or found it harder than she thought to juggle work and classes. Either of those would be understandable. It's also possible that she never intended to keep that part of the bargain- mail order brides aren't necessarily wonderful people who never lie. We can't know without knowing more about her and the relationship than we do.

It's possible that she tried taking ESL classes and wasn't very good at it, and is ashamed to admit that. English isn't an easy language to learn, especially for speakers of a very different language like Chinese, for the same reasons it's difficult for an English speaker to learn Chinese. And it does get harder to learn a new language as you get older.
posted by Anne Neville at 1:41 PM on January 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


And to be blunt about it, it's her refusal to even attempt an ESL class that bugs me, yeah. She's really firm about not learning any more English than she has to.

He really did try to learn Chinese, he went to the class and took online courses. She's just outright refused. Don't get me wrong, I like her, I respect her a great deal, she was amazing when he was sick, she stepped right up, found a translator, and dealt with the hassle of relocating, refinancing, and dealing with a nearly-paralyzed stroke patient. She didn't let the language barrier stop her. So it's not like I resent her, far from it. But it still, irrationally I suppose, bugs me.
posted by disclaimer at 1:46 PM on January 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


I had no idea there was a history of mail-order brides from places like Scotland and Wales in the 19th century! How fascinating. I'll have to Google this when I'm not at work...

I tried to explain to my Japanese host mother that my great-grandmother was a picture bride, and she exclaimed "That sounds romantic!" I didn't have the heart or the language skills to correct her.
posted by sunset in snow country at 4:22 PM on January 15, 2016


I think as time has gone on that marriage has maybe come full circle to the passivity of arranged marriages. Replace family connections with Internet connections and algorithms -- "photographs-by-mail" being intervening mediating technologies -- so now we find that people prefer to expend only the energy required to swipe right (left?) to begin a possible future.

I think the romaticness of picture-brides comes from the "I intentionally chose you" part of this signalling. And as much as I've tried to figure out where this step happens in a bar or random social situation, because I don't think there's a real-life acquaintance where you have essentially the same information about available partners and are required to articulate an intent (clicking a link) to begin interacting.
posted by rhizome at 5:12 PM on January 15, 2016


Swiping right has worked well for me! (derail)
posted by josher71 at 5:17 PM on January 15, 2016


Also, she moved to an english speaking country... where he already was.

If he had moved to china and refused to learn chinese plenty of people would be giving him garbage cans of rightly deserved shit, but often when the tables are turned it's like oh people haev unreasonable expectations?


Hmmm, I think this comment lacks a little perspective. America (like Australia) is so much more than an "english-speaking" country, and indeed you will find people speaking dozens of languages in both countries that possess only rudimentary English - and have done so for decades - and this has been no barrier to their full and engaged participation as citizens.

Likewise, a stroll down the Bund in Shanghai - or indeed many other major cities through Asia, Africa and South America, will reveal to you a plethora of ex-pat Westerners who speak not a lick of the most popular language of the country in which they reside. It's so common with expats in my experience, in fact I would say more don't speak the language than do, even when they have been there for, yes, decades.
posted by smoke at 5:34 PM on January 15, 2016 [6 favorites]


> "I had no idea there was a history of mail-order brides from places like Scotland and Wales in the 19th century!"

Look up "Highland Clearances" and "Enclosure" to get a rather depressing perspective on some aspects of this.
posted by kyrademon at 6:31 PM on January 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


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."

I realized that I assumed, from reading Internet comments from whiny misogynists that most men getting mail order brides were those bitter, small minded, entitled MRA type guys who write Internet comments about how American women expect too much from men (like needing to feel like he respects and loves her and cares about her and feels like she's being treated with kindness) and that only foreign women know "how to treat a man" (I assume that meant being okay with mothering him like he's a toddler, putting up with feeling lonely in a marriage and letting someone you aren't really all that attracted have terrible, unfulfilling sex with you, and then you generally do a lot of pretending so the guy can feel like a real pooh-bah/king of his castle because you were always told not to expect your husband to fulfill your needs or help you).

I can't seem to think of it as a blue collar/white collar thing. my impression is these guys come from all income levels and what they have in common is that they aren't successful with women (or they're deeply resentful from a broken relationship and think if they get they can control a woman who is all alone without financial or social resources so she won't leave him like his ex) then they hilariously claim American women are spoiled for wanting to be treated with the same respect and affection these dudes feel entitled to.

But my understanding was basically based on those ridiculous Internet comments, so this is all new information to me.
posted by discopolo at 8:36 PM on January 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


Technically it sounds like these dudes have to be pretty loaded, at the very least to pay for all of that paperwork and international flights and whatnot. My impression is that mail order brides aren't for the poor. Unfortunately, my impression from what I've read is that most of them are older, have some money, and really enjoy being dominant and marrying some poor woman who can't have hot water in her home. (Unfortunately, I had a college instructor who liked to go on about the story he wrote about mail order brides and I read it. Eeeek.) "Yeah, you're so desperate you have to marry ME for money!" Ughhhhhh, the power dynamics make me about want to throw up at that.

I'm glad that Kate girl and the fashion blogger are happy and so far their dudes sound decent, but I don't think I can be blamed for wondering and worrying.

Meanwhile, a girl I know's dad is marrying a mail order bride her own age and all kinds of fun uncomfortableness is ensuing.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:19 PM on January 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


Something like this worked out fantastically well for my brother, when everyone in the family was skeptical to say the least. My brother, in his 50s at the time, was a mess, divorced with three grown kids, terrible debt, and ran through all my elderly parents' money creating a terrible financial mess and alienating my entire family. He also had developed a prescription drug addiction we did not know about until after the fact. He had had drinking problems in the past, and smoked since he was a kid. He was not a bad person nor unkind, but he just could not manage his life.

So while we were not speaking for several years, he met a Russian girl in her 30s online, went to Russia to meet her, and brought her back to the USA and married her. They live across the country from us, so I did not meet her until much later. I figured it was just another of my brother's disastrous bad choices and would end in more misery. A year later, they had a baby girl. An innocent baby has a way of softening hearts, and I sent a baby gift and got back in touch with my brother.

I am delighted that I was wrong about this marriage. My brother's second wife is loving, responsible, gets along great with his older kids, and their daughter who is 11 now is bright, polite, fully bi-lingual in English and Russian, and mom and daughter visit the Russian grandparents for the summer every couple of years. Most amazing is how she has gotten my brother into shape. She handles the finances, and even got him to quit smoking which is a minor miracle as he had tried to quit many times before. She works in a job where she used her Russian language skills, and also makes and sell beautiful jewelry online. I have visited them, and they both love each other and are very happy. So...sometimes these arrangements can turn out well, although of course there is a large potential for abuse as has been pointed out before.
posted by mermayd at 6:49 AM on January 16, 2016 [6 favorites]


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