Although the motives of women seeking Western husbands are often driven by economic concerns, this is not always the case. Bibiana conducted in-depth interviews with several “brides,” husbands of mail order brides, and the proprietor of a mail order bride agency in Colombia. Most mail order brides now come from Southeast Asia , Latin America , and Russia and the Ukraine. The prospective husbands they seek come primarily from the United States or Western Europe, although there is a market for foreign brides in South Korea and Japan as well.
Besides, their excellent education and quick wit may surprise you, so get ready to reconsider myths about blondes and their intelligence. Still, you should not think that an Asian woman will start on her emancipation path as soon as she sets foot in the West.
This paper is an attempt to show how the internet and its abiding companion, computers, have greatly facilitated the diasporic movement among Filipino women never before imagined. Focus shall be on the so-called “mail-order brides system,” in which men and women meet one another on the internet for friendship, love, or lifetime companionship. The interaction is computer-mediated and highly selective of target clients. That is, it reaches out only to those who have knowledge of, and access to, use of this facility. Hence, women residing from remote rural areas in the Philippines are filtered out.
“It allows people to increase their potential dating pool,” Zug says. “For some people that means increasing mail order spouse it beyond the borders of your country, and I don’t see why that’s a problem. It’s freeing.”
Women who travel to a far-off country to marry a stranger are putting themselves at great risk, and grim statistics confirm the danger. Many incidents of violence against mail order brides have been well documented, especially in the United States and South Korea.
You can stay in your typical scope of commonality and be a valiant pariah for the individual who will wind up internet brides. Among Plains Indians, sight-unseen marriage was frequently arranged with the help of a middleman and could involve the payment of a “bride price,” intended to compensate the woman’s family for the impending loss of her labor. In 1854, at a peace conference at Fort Laramie, a prominent Cheyenne chief requested of the U.S. Army the gift of 100 white women as brides, but the army refused.
In our first study, we also surveyed a group of Colombian women who were attempting to become mail order brides, and we compared them with a group of Colombian women who were not pursuing a husband in this way. In addition to asking about their preferences for a husband, we also asked them what they thought men were looking for in a wife. The responses of the two groups to open-ended questions about mating were much more similar than different and the items relevant to what they wanted in a prospective husband were the ones that showed the least difference. About 10 years ago, I conducted two studies of the mating preferences of mail order brides from Colombia, Russia, and the Philippines with one of my students, Bibiana Paez .
The countries the women come from are faced with unemployment, malnutrition and inflation. However, economic factors are not the only driving factor for women in Asia to enter the mail-order industry.
As practice shows, online dating is often the beginning of an ideal relationship and a happy family. Thousands of couples are formed annually thanks to the mail order bride agency. The problem is one – to find a soul mate that is suitable in appearance, beliefs and life values is very difficult.