Male-ordered brides

By JENNIFER GOLDBLATT, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published May 20, 2002

American men dissatisfied with American women are finding love half a world away. But what are these Russian, Asian and Latin American brides finding?

In the recent (mostly forgettable) movie Birthday Girl, a lonely bank teller logs onto fromrussiawithlove.com and lands himself a mail-order bride. The romance sours when the bride, played by (a mostly undressed) Nicole Kidman, cons him into robbing the bank.

Charlton Heston makes out far better in the 1954 movie The Naked Jungle. His mail-order bride helps him rescue his chocolate plantation from an army of ants.

Mail-order brides make for more than the occasional oddball movie script, with a growing number of men meeting their spouses this way. More than 6,000 couples met via mail order last year, up from some 2,000 a decade ago. (Many of the Web sites have a women-seeking-men option, but most of the available men are from the United States. Others are typically from Canada, France and Germany.) Click on www.euroladies.com, you'll find more than 8,000 women seeking romance and marriage. Irina from Kazakhstan longs for an educated man who wants to make a family. She is 30, a tallish 175 centimeters and 59 kilograms (5 feet 9, 130 pounds, according to the site's metric converter). Her English rating is a 3, "proficient."

Allforeignbrides.com features 6,898 Asian, African or Latin American women. Lin-Juan, from China, is 36, 5 feet 3, 103 pounds. Her interests are reading, swimming, bowling and table tennis.

Finding love abroad: 4 success stories

Many of the estimated 200 matchmaking services offer e-mail addresses for $15 apiece and phone introductions for $50. For thousands of dollars, they offer weeklong trips to all corners of the planet, where translators will help the men converse with what might turn out to be the woman of their dreams.

Are the women seeking love, or just a one-way ticket to U.S. citizenship? Are the men seeking someone to love, honor and obey, or a vulnerable woman who will obey them for the sake of getting a green card?

With matters of the heart, who can say?

Tom Mills was unlucky in love. Three marriages, three divorces. The first lasted seven years before she went home to Montana. The second split after four years. The third, the one he met at a singles dance at the Safety Harbor Spa, lasted not quite two years. Mills is convinced that wives Nos. 2 and 3 were more interested in his bank account than in his companionship.

All the ladies that answered his personal ads also seemed to be digging for gold rather than looking for love.

"Every gal I met wanted to get married after three days. It took awhile to realize that it's not me, it's the car and the house. I wanted to find me a nice traditional gal who was interested in me -- not what I had.

"All I ever wanted was to be married, but all I've ever been is divorced," said Mills, a 67-year-old real estate investor from New Port Richey. "I don't want to be married to someone who's going to manipulate or control me, or wants half of my real estate."

By last spring, Mills' lonely heart had grown tired of hunting. He was about to give up when his best friend, who had married a Russian woman, handed him a European Connections catalog.

"When I saw the magazine and the video it was like an answer to my prayers. I thought, 'Look at all these girls, 40 pages and 8 to 12 gals on every page. And there isn't one who's overweight, or has short hair. And there are a lot of blonds.' And of course I'm partial to blonds."

Mills paid European Connections $3,500 for a round-trip ticket from Tampa to Moscow, 13 days in the towering Rossiya Hotel, three arranged socials, a translator, a tour of the city and a walking tour of the Kremlin.

"I told everybody I met. At first some people thought I was a little tetched in the head. And I said, 'Hey, with three (marriages) behind me that were an absolute disaster, I had to try something different."'

He figured the absolute worst that could happen is he'd get his first vacation in five years.

[Handout photo] The European Connections Web site assures men: "You don't have to be rich, handsome, famous or lucky to have beautiful, devoted, Russian or Ukraine bride.''

European Connections' Internet catalog, www.euroladies.com, helps lonely hearts search for their soul mates by age, nationality, hair color, weight, height and level of English proficiency.

The Web site assures: "You don't have to be rich, handsome, famous or lucky to have beautiful, devoted, Russian or Ukraine bride. . . . The women are just normal people looking for a normal life." Russian men are "poor prospects for supporting a family," because 50 percent of them are alcoholics and they have a tradition of treating women poorly, the site says. "Those who are financially capable are gangsters and women don't want their children to learn that kind of lifestyle."

Such generalizations and stereotypes are common to these sites. About 150,000 women advertise themselves every year through these services, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Once a man selects his future partner, he applies for a fiance visa. She undergoes a medical exam and a criminal background check. Her fingerprints are taken. To determine if it's a bona fide relationship, the State Department may examine phone and e-mail records and photos of the couple.

After she arrives in the United States, she has 90 days to marry the fiance who applied for her visa. For the first two years of marriage she is a "conditional resident." After that, he must file a petition to convert her status to permanent resident. The INS determines whether to grant that status.

Mills landed in Moscow a year ago in April with high hopes and three qualifications for the woman of his dreams: She had to be childless, blond and at least 35 years old.

He tried to appreciate the landmarks the tour guide pointed out on the bus ride from the airport to the hotel. But he couldn't concentrate, with the prospect of finding a mate close at hand. "The adrenaline was flowing," he said.

The night of the big social, he stationed himself in the hotel ballroom with his interpreter. There were chicken wings, champagne and 600 Russian women -- 15 to each American man. This was way better than the singles dance at the Regency Park Civic Association in Port Richey.

"I've never seen more blond hair, cleavage and high heels in my life," said Mills. "I said, 'This sure beats Florida."'

He interviewed three candidates before he spotted a woman who sent his heart racing. Her blue eyes captivated him from across the crowded room. Her honey-blond mane enchanted him. He sent his translator to bring her over.

Her name was Natalia . . . Natalia Smirnova. She had a college degree and a career as a computer programmer. She was 41 and after her divorce had ushered a son through his teenage years on her own. She was looking for someone who could offer a stable home life -- someone who didn't drink or smoke.

Mills, Smirnova and the interpreter walked to a restaurant a few blocks from the hotel. There, he squared away the ground rules: He was not rich. He wanted a woman to come to the United States and get a job that interested her, because he works every day.

After dinner, the interpreter left them in the hotel lounge to get better acquainted over glasses of Coca-Cola and a Russian-English dictionary.

They shared their hard-luck love stories. They described what they were seeking in a companion. He wanted someone who was interested in him, not his bank account. She said she had a good job and family in Russia and had no need to go to America -- unless she found something that compelled her there.

They made plans to meet for breakfast. He fell asleep that night thinking that amid the hundreds of Russian women, Natalia held the most promise.

"From the get-go the chemistry was there. American women are just a little rough around the edges and maybe a whole lot opinionated to boot. But Natalia wanted to find out more about me."

They spent the next days touring Moscow. They saw Red Square, St. Basil's Cathedral, Lenin's Tomb and the Kremlin. They ate at the Russian version of TGI Friday's.

He charmed her with a shower of affection. The snow-white chrysanthemums sent her into tears. The bottle of perfume -- called Beautiful -- made her feel just that way.

"Tom is very careful," Natalia said. "At breakfast he asked if my tea was hot enough. He opens door and closes door. He shows his love. In my country, men take what they want from women. Men don't want to give love. They just want to know what I can give to them."

Five days after they met, Mills mustered up a marriage proposal over a candlelit dinner, no translator needed.

She accepted.

Cherry Blossoms, which has been matchmaking since 1974, warns on its Web site that "not every woman who publishes her ad with us is looking for love and marriage." There are always that 5 to 10 percent who "just want to leave their country or want to get something from you, and this is true even in the USA."

Is the American way more of a lure than the man who brings her over? Will she bolt the day her citizenship is assured?

It's something the owner of European Connections warns his customers about during orientation.

"You've got to be smart about this," said Preston Steckel. "There's a lot of people over there, and there are some bad ones. If a 50-year-old is looking for a girl in her 20s, he's asking for trouble.

"She's got youth and beauty and what do you have? You have money and lots of it."

About 50 percent of the men who go on his trips ultimately find a wife, Steckel said. "But we can't guarantee anyone that marriage is going to last."

Tom Mills, 67, went through three marriages before meeting his future wife Natalya, 42, through Europe? an Connections. Five days after they met in Russia, Mills proposed.

Mills says he isn't worried that Smirnova will leave him after she gets citizenship. He is comforted by two things she told him: One, she hadn't planned to attend the social where they met but just happened to be in Moscow for a job interview; two, that night she turned down a wealthy American man before she met Mills.

"She obviously is educated and wanted to come here and get a job," he said. "She didn't want to be someone's play toy."

Smirnova says she had not even thought about living in America before she met Mills.

"I think it is true that some women want American men, not Russian, because they decide this life is better than in Russia. But for me, green card, no green card, it's not important."

If she does change her mind, there is nothing the INS can do.

"The U.S. government is not the love police," said INS spokesman Russ Bergeron. "If the woman walks out the day that the conditional nature of her permit is lifted, the government isn't liable, and neither is the service that matched them up."

Whether you meet your mate on euroladies.com, on a blind date or by accident, he says, there is but one guarantee: "There are no guarantees in love."

In Seattle a few years ago, a man shot his 25-year-old Filipino mail-order bride. He started beating her the first week they lived together. Three months ago, a 40-year-old man in Everett, Wash., was convicted of murdering his 20-year-old mail-order bride from Kyrgyzstan. Concerned about men abusing mail-order brides, the INS changed its rules in 1997 so battered spouses can petition for their own permanent green cards if the U.S. citizens they married do not do so for them. About 3,300 women petitioned for permanent status under this provision in 1998. (Not all these petitions were made by fiance visas.)

Tampa lawyer John Ovink says one of his clients was a Russian mail-order bride who said her husband kept an ax under his mattress and forced her to act as a maid. Ovink says she hired him to petition for a restraining order. When the judge denied it, she disappeared.

He worries there are many such women. "They don't know their rights, they're scared, or they think they need a lot of money," Ovink said.

Steckel says the risk of abuse isn't high. He says a man who can plunk down the kind of money it takes to go on one of his trips wouldn't beat his wife.

"What type of man is going take a trip like this and go to Russia, spend money, time over there and fill out the paperwork?" Steckel asked. More often, "It's the guy that calls and tells us she's left."

So why is it that so many people are turning online or to catalogs to order up romance from a far-off land? Gil Rodman, an assistant professor of communications at the University of South Florida, says it emanates from a gap in the social fabric that has been widening for decades.

"Any real sense of public and communal space where people would otherwise meet and interact is withering away," he said.

"A fair amount of that people attribute to the growth of the suburbs. People don't know their neighbors in that space. They get in the car and drive 20 minutes away, park in a big parking lot, go into work and then do it all over again.

"In a way, meeting people online is no more or less spontaneous than all sorts of other meetings that people have been using for quite a while."

Lynn Visson, author of Wedded Strangers, Challenges of Russian-American Marriages, traces arranged love to simple practicality.

"Most of these men are in their late 30s and early 40s and they want a younger woman," Visson said. "Many of these men are upset with American feminist women who think only about themselves and their careers, and are not interested in home, husband and family."

Visson said the men "wake up one day and say, 'Uh oh, I've been a workaholic,' and all the girls they know are too old and the bar scene is not for them."

[Times photo: Jacquelyn Martin] Natalya Mills sits on the knee of her husband, Tom, beside a boat filled with silk flowers that the two designed at their New Port Richey home.

Whatever is behind it, things are working for Tom Mills and Natalia Smirnova.

She passed her driving test and takes English language classes three times a week at Marchman Technical Education Center. She and Mills ride their bikes on the Pinellas Trail. They have season tickets to the Florida Orchestra and the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. They go dancing.

"The age doesn't matter," Smirnova said. "Tom likes to dance for half the night; I like to dance."

All Mills knows is he has found happiness. "American women are more interested in money than they are in being a good wife or being married -- they're just looking for someone to keep them.

"I want someone that wants to have a nice home and live in harmony. She is very happy with her choice. And certainly I am. It's really like a dream that this has happened.

"I used to sit here and watch the TV show Touched by an Angel and wonder, 'Hey God, what are you going to do for me?' And now, he's given me this."

-- Times news researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

Popular Web sites

www.cherryblossoms.com
Claims to be the world's first picture personal ad service, having helped more than 20,000 couples meet for love and marriage since 1974.

www.americansingles.com
Provides anonymous correspondence and chat rooms, and a place to provide personal profiles available to its more than 3-million members.

www.euroladies.com
European Connections offers Internet and mail catalogs, along with trips to Russia and the Ukraine that provide receptions featuring hundreds of women seeking foreign men.

www.russianbrides.com
The Anastasia agency offers tours to Russia and the Ukraine and touts the largest female-to-male ratios at its socials. Offers Internet and print catalogs. You can purchase addresses, phone numbers and even send flowers.

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.