Post-Soviet Dating

Myths about Men

I've said a little in my previous post about population dynamics in Eastern Europe and particularly in the Soviet Union, societal expectations, and other factors which lead to a pool of marriageable age women who might consider the unusual option of marrying someone from abroad. I'll play fast and loose with that term "marriageable age" since, after all, my Uncle John got married in his early 70s to his high school sweetheart. But I digress.

There's some myths that abound about the kind of men who would consider using international match making services. There's some myths about the kind of women who consider these services, And there are myths about the matching services. For now, let's examine some of the things said about western men who explore online international match making services.

Myth One: They are desperate losers. The kind of men that no woman would be foolish enough to want. Stumbling and bumbling in romance, perhaps meaning well, but with a talent for doing or saying just the wrong thing at the wrong time and ending up alone as a result. Possibly still living in their mother's basement even in their thirties. But thinking maybe just maybe if they find a woman desperate enough, they might find a match. And those Russian girls will do anything to escape the misery, poverty, degradation, and patheticness of their wretched lives in Russia.

Pardon me, I need to go out and wash my mouth out with soap for having articulated that. But in kinder terms (or perhaps on occasion less kind terms), I've heard this a lot. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this has not encouraged me to be very open about my own exploration of international matching. There is a reason I am anonymous Jack and the names of real people in this column are changed!

But that's pop that particular myth right now. It IS partially correct: men (and women) who explore this option really are in some very real sense desperate. But not terrible pathetic desperate: just clear about what they want and willing to explore options outside the usual to work towards those goals. Determined is a better word, but desperate also describes the willingness to go beyond the normal to achieve their goals: this is not the undertaking of the timid.

Let me skip over the myth that Russian women are poor and miserable and would do anything to escape the wretched misery of their lives: I'll address that in a future column, Myths About Women. Trust me on this for now: that just ain't how things are.

I will freely admit that there is a good chance (but doubt there are statistics to back this up) that lots of lonely men for whom things have not worked out locally check out international matching services. But the leap from curious to prepare to make it happen is a very very big. Of every 20 men who log into such sites and pay whatever basic membership service fees might exist, 19 will never do much more. The chronically timid and shy, the less socially adept... These guys are very very unlikely to go so far as getting on a plane to Moscow and getting out to face the world of Cyrillic signs, visa registration, bizarre new foods and customs, and no way to talk to anyone around them. Including, perhaps, the woman they supposedly came to meet. What's more, even for those who DO make the trip and make that meeting, suddenly they are in a situation where their body language and social skills will be put to an EXTREME test. When you don't have the depth of language to use for communication, women will look even more and more at how you behave and act and your body language. People who send out the wrong signals will be sending out those wrong signals to someone paying more attention to those signals than usual. As odd as this might sound, showing up for a first meeting in scruffy jeans and a well loved T-shirt instead of dressing stylishly in your best is a more unpardonable sin for meeting a Russian woman than it is here (and trust me on this one, guys: you need to make a good first impression on a first meeting and sending "I don't know crap about style and don't care" signals is not working in your favour. Not here. Not there. But especially not there. More about this and related ettiquette in later columns.).

Let me phrase that another way. To succeed with women in Russia, you will have to have already been able to succeed with women in the west. That might sound contradictory: after all, if you are succeeding here, why are you looking beyond that? What I mean is that you have to be able to create and sustain dating situations. There might be any one of a number of good reasons why those do not end up in successful long term relationships, but if you are utterly unable to make connections here at all, you are unlikely to have different results there.

By the way, those are actually learnable skills for the most part. If this is something you struggle with, there's a lot of people willing to accept your money to help you. :-) But seriously, while I do not agree with all the points and sentiments some of this folks espouse, you can learn about what kinds of things you do in dating situations that make it more likely that you'll create successful outcomes. Granted, these guys often mean getting some really good sex when they talk about successful outcomes, and I consider that a bit shallow. But they make some good points and in some cases, provide some strong theory to explain where they are coming from and why. I can recommend David Deangelo's Double Your Dating E-books, video series, and lectures as well as his free mail list. Along the same vein, there's The Dating Wizard. I recommend exploring them, trying a few ideas out, and taking what you find useful and discard what you find less so. If you really are a sex tourist, who knows? You might learn things to save you airfare and leaving broken hearts behind you.

Suffice it to say that the kind of men who succeed in meeting and marrying women from overseas are much more likely to be the kind of men that have a great deal positive to offer and are not prone to fumbling dating situations. Elena Petrova of Elena's Models (more about dating sites later, but suffice it to say she runs one of the better and more reputable sites) estimates from her statistics that most men who actually go so far as to travel to Russia (as opposed to just browsing pictures and never doing anything further) are well educated men with college degrees and successful careers. She claims that marriages through her agency and ones like it are still working in about 80% of the cases after five years, which compares a bit favourably to the general success rate of around 50%. The kind of people who typically enter into such a relationship are more committed to making things work than average, it could be argued.

Myth Two: Men are just sex tourists. I wish I could dispel this myth cleanly and clearly, but the truth is... Sex tourists exist. There are men who think overseas travel is a great way to put more notches in the belt or for some reasons think they need to experience sex on every continent (The pickings are slim in Antarctica.). Rather like wanting a perfect trifecta of blonde, brunette, and redhead, and about as meaningful. These guys exist, and they may well take advantage of some match making services to set things up ahead of time for their trips.

Still, a marriage site is just that: full of women who are all about the relationship. Guys wanting a wide variety of interesting bedroom romps are looking for something rather different, and the women on marriage sites are not going to be commitment free slobbering love monkeys who'll just forget it all when he leaves. Not that it doesn't happen, not that it isn't used that way, but there are better venues for sex tourism than marriage services. And ways to spot these kind of men and information for women to know about them ahead of time, so it may not be the epic plague some think it is.

But this myth does have its reality. Natasha told me of one of her friends who met a foreign man and they had a nice time together a week and then he left and never again a word from him. The friend is understandably disappointed and miffed and pretty down on the whole experience and accuses the fellow of just wanting to play her for a week. Maybe so. But it is possible he just didn't click well with her and rather than be honest and talk about it, he chose the unkind and inconsiderate act of just ignoring her and blowing her off, leaving the impression of having been a sex tourist even when that had not been his intention. But it would be unfair of me to say that is what happen. He really could have been the hopeless cad she portrays him as being. This was certainly one of Natasha's quite legitimate fears when meeting me for the first time.

Myth Three: Men are chronic abusers seeking submissive women where their spousal visa status makes them dependent and vulnerable.

Again, this is a myth with a good deal of underlying truth, but not to the extent society would have you believe. The real truth here is that there are abusive men out there. Lots of them. And some of them have used marriage services with overseas matches to find women and use their apparent position of power to control them. Virtually all men who abuse women have serious control issues and fears, and seek out situations in which they will have control. An international marriage might seem to offer that.

But while there's a big media splash with an American husband beats his Russian wife, there's much less for plain jane everyday spousal abuse that does not cross those lines. Nor is there reports of "10,000th successful marriage from Ukraine since 1990" or such. So an APPEARANCE is there. And some services offer "If the first one does not work out, the next is free" kinds of deals that, at least to reporters looking at things quickly and not looking to see what "does not work out" means, sound quite ripe for abuse.

Abuse exists, do not get me wrong. But there's no statistics to suggest that international marriages are more prone to this issue than any other. In fact there are hints they are LESS prone: the kinds of commitment that it takes to try to explore overseas matching tends to work against people with control issues. Never the less, the problem exists and is real, and marriage service agencies often have little to do or say in the matter, or offer little in the way of protection for women. One site I used asked me if I had a criminal record, and then when I asked "No", this information was posted in my profile. That was it. Nothing to verify that I was honest, yet presented to a Russian reader as if it was measured fact. It's not hard to see how that could be abused.

There are more myths out there, but those are three big ones. That the men who use the sites are desperate and losers. That they are sex tourists. That they are abusers. The first is unlikely, at least among those who will actually make something happen. The second issue of sex tourism and the third of abuse is a lot hard to say much one way or the other, but at least several independent lines of anecdotal evidence suggest that it is a problem, but hardly a scourge. Statistically speaking, men who are likely to successfully use international matching services are successful likeable men with solid careers and stable lifestyles and mindsets. According to Elena Petrova, about 80% of marriages through international matchmaking are still working after five years. Considering the roughly 50% failure rate of regular marriages (though of course many of those last more than five years too), that rather suggests that it is more determined to be successful rather than the artless, the unkind, and the destructive who are pursuing international match making.

posted by Anonymous Jack @ 11:50 PM