My uncle Tom is a frustrated man. A handsome 40-year old with a successful career in the insurance industry, Tom has been single since he divorced his wife whom he claimed “wasn’t holy enough.” Since then, he’s been on the quest for the perfect woman, a being he describes as beautiful, pious and committed to a life that reads like a book of the Bible.
Over the years, the family has seen Tom go through an array of women, each of whom has some hidden flaw that, when revealed to him, results in her failure to make a repeat performance at the Christmas party. After years of searching, Tom had become doubtful that he would ever be able to start a family full of little Catholic robots. Recently, however, Tom announced that he had found a solution to this severe problem – a mail-order bride.
Tom’s decision was met with bewilderment and laughter from close friends and relatives. The term “mail-order bride” commonly evokes images of bearded lumberjacks sitting alone in Canada and sending away for foreign blonde girls with names like “Natasha.” I, for one, wasn’t even certain such women actually existed. Did anyone really find these services legitimate?
It turns out that my Uncle Tom is just one of thousands of American men who search the web looking for the perfect match. The business of mail-order brides, which has become primarily Internet-based, is a testament to the expectation of immediate gratification to which Americans have become so accustomed.
Type the phrase “mail order bride” into a Google search and hundreds of thousands of web sites come up advertising women from all over the globe. Once at a web site, finding a woman is literally clicks away. Pick a region, an age group and a hair color. Browse through the pictures; find your soul mate.
Companies vary in their marketing methods. Some emphasize women’s desire to find true love, while others stress their compliance and respect for traditional gender roles within marriage. What unites all of the businesses, however, is the assurance that within their web-site encoding lies the perfect woman for you. And certainly, the figures suggest this claim’s validity.
At the Encounters International office, a company based in Rockville, Maryland, a wall is covered with 250 hearts that represent the number of successful pairings brokered by the agency’s director. Countless web-site testimonials bear witness to both the legitimacy of these services and their expertise at finding true love.
Not all tales are those of marital bliss, however. Recent criticism of the industry has emerged in the wake of horror stories about matches gone terribly wrong. In 2000, a 300-pound husband sat on his mail-order bride from Krygzstan while an accomplice strangled her to death.
Other incidents of abuse have resulted in numerous lawsuits and increased pressure on Congress to pass legislation to better protect these women through measures such as more stringent screening processes for male clientele. Under the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act proposed last summer, agencies that don’t ask male clients about marital history and criminal background would face potential fines of up to $20,000.
Legal issues also arise with respect to the protection of men who use these services. Among male clientele there is a frequent concern that women are only looking for U.S. citizenship. For every story of a bride who endured physical or psychological abuse, there is one of a man who paid for access to an Internet “bride bank,” a travel visa and a plane ticket to America for a woman who emptied his bank account and abruptly divorced him after only a few years of marriage.
In a society in which money often equals power, love, too, can be bought. A world in which strangers can be connected by a few mouse clicks means that companions can be “purchased” from anywhere in the globe. Though the brides are willful participants in the process of mail-order marriage, it is difficult to preserve their rights when their situation has resulted from a “transaction.” The debate continues about the extent to which the government should regulate these services that bring women from vastly different cultures to the altars of America by way of a down payment.
For the woman Uncle Tom ordered from the Ukraine, the reality of mail-order marriage was all too harsh. Unhappy with how much he wanted to restrict her everyday life, she faked a weekend trip to California and left the U.S. without telling him she was backing out of the agreement. In response to the “I told you so” sentiments from my family, Tom only replied, “If I had known she was so immature, I never would have gotten her in the first place.” Oddly enough, he is still single.
