Post-Soviet Dating

Myths about International Match Making Agencies

I’ve written about some of the myths about international meetings for love and marriage. Yes, that sounds odd and is quite the awkward mouthful, mostly because I am trying very hard to avoid the offensive term “mail order bride” and its attendent image of treating women like commodities from a catalog, like a sweater from Lands’ End, or a pair of lacey Victoria’s Secret underwear that arrives with the model too (What male fantasy!). Unfortunately, to talk about the myths about the introduction agencies, avoiding this term is impossible. Many of the harsh attitudes that people have towards the industry stem from the image of that unfortunate moniker.

Think of the movie Birthday Girl. An English banker goes online, looks at profiles, choses a woman, she arrives but she’s not what he was expecting. She doesn’t speak English, except for ‘yes’, smokes, and on the way home from the airport, throws up violently in a roadside ditch. On the first night, she’s explicit and forceful about pursuing sex. When she’s asleep and presumably cannot hear him, he tries to call back to the agency to return his defective purchase. Only the agency has disappeared. It all turns out to be a scam. But they fall in love anyway and run away to Moscow at the end with the whole circle coming round again since the only word he knows in Russian is, of course, “да”.

It’s a good movie and I recommend it. But it has as much to do with international dating and Russian match making services as The Interpreter has to do with the politics of the United Nations or Cold Mountain has to do with understanding the root causes of the American Civil War. Mostly it just reveals that I have an obsession with Nicole Kidman.

Agencies that handle international introductions range from the good to the less reputable, but none are delivery services. You are not going to the airport to meet some sultry blonde with a sexy Russian accent, or at least not outside your fantasy life. Accussations that agencies are trafficing in women, running prostitution rings, or are bunch of scam artists are almost universally false. Most agencies have little to no vested interest in how things actually turn out: They are introduction agencies and no more. Their fiscal model is essentially analogous to any domestic online dating site. Think of it as a matchmaker.com community dedicated to introducing men to Russian women, just like there’s a special community for Catholics to meet each other, or J-date for people seeking Jewish partners, or Tall Clubs for the vertically gifted to find each other. Those agencies might want your dating situations to work out in general “wouldn’t it be nice” and “we can put this in our testimontials sections” fashion. But if it works, or it does not, they have no vested fiscal interest. The idea that they are making money by shoveling women across international borders for economic explotation is groundless.

That also leads to the arguement about prostitution. Someone might try to use match.com to get *ahem* customers, but they’d find their online profile tossed quickly if they did. International matching is much the same: Prostitution is not about some kind of long term lifestyle, but the act of women in desperation trying to meet immediate (and they hope, temporary) needs. It’s the oldest profession, but it’s not actually a professional at all. International matching is a terrible way to do this: Only one customer and it could take months for him to visit and whom knows what really happens? The idea is ludicrious.

But somehow it persists. I think it comes from the idea that there’s vast sums of money being made selling the women, which stems from that terrible “mail order bride” term. The people making money off this business are the airlines, the telephone companies (Calling long distance to central Russia is not cheap!), the hotels, and perhaps the lawyers who assist in visa applications (and which rarely are associated with the matching agencies and are doing nothing more than providing legal assistance and guidance on immigration law).

The last accusation of being scam artists, on the other hand, might ring true. Agencies range from the well run and sophisticated sites that offer good, reliable service to the not so grand. If you do some searching online for reviews and comments, you can turn these up easily. Telling signs are what their business model is (e.g. Is it free or is there a fee to subscribe? As you might expect, free services are much more prone to abuses, or at the very least to have a less commited clientel, both of men and women using the service), how long it has been in operation, whether it has a base in the area it serves, and similar pragmatic questions.

Let me illustrate with a couple of hypothetical examples (which are based quite firmly in real agencies: I’ll talk about my own experiences in future columns, but let’s stick to the abstract for now).

Agency Number One is totally free. Russian (and other eastern European nationals) women can post their profile here for no cost, provide one or perhaps several digital pictures (or real pictures which the agencies will scan for them for a fee), and free translation from Russian to English. Men subscribe to the service, also for free, and post a profile on their systems. The basic standard kinds of things are offered: searching for certain age ranges, hair colour, eye colour, height, weight, language skills (okay, that’s a new one to those of you more familiar with personals.theonion.com and their ilk, but a logical one), perhaps special geographic area searchs (e.g. only list women in and around Kiev), and perhaps even some special keywords. So if you are a big fan of opera, you can toss that into a search and every profile that mentions “opera” and matches your other search criteria will come up (including those that might be so explicit as to say just how much they really hate opera...).

If that sounds a bit cold and clinical, like shopping for a particular size, keep in mind that is simply how search engines with online profiles, rightly or wrongly, are structured. Take a look at any ordinary online dating site and you’ll see much the same. I’ve always wondered a bit at them: I mean are there really men who will only seek women with blue eyes and chatreuse hair? Yet every single site I know seems to have these meaningless search fields. Maybe there really are lots of men who only want brunettes? I’ve never noticed a correlation between my level of interest and her height.

So you’ve posted a profile with a brief description of yourself and look around a little at the offerings and there’s lots and lots of women. Usually in pretty good pictures, almost universally dressed up, and predominately in the 20s and 30s age group. There are some older, but not a lot (certainly not in comparison to a regular online matching service here), and a few late teens, but not a lot of those either. And it is very quickly apparently this is very different. An American gal will talk about her interests, the things she likes, the things she does in her spare time, perhaps her career, and perhaps a little about what she’s looking for in a relationship (though usually in vague terms: looking for my soulmate, searching for that chemistry, want to be friends first and see how things grow from there, etc ). These Russian profiles, on the other hand, focus in hard and sharp on the relationship and the interests and free time kinds of things will be a very small part of the profile. And relationship goals are very clear and laid out. “I’m seeking a man for marriage and children. You are successful and professional, even-tempered, family-oriented, and caring. I am capable of deep long feelings. The family and family traditions are very important to me.”

Toto, we are not in Kansas any more...

This leads to candy store time. Go back to the search engine. Okay, let’s see. Let’s look for just fluent in English, at least six feet five inches tall, waist length hair, blue eyes, within 100 miles of oh... where do I want to visit?... Talinn! Nothing. Okay, maybe six feet or taller is okay, and at least pretty good at English if not completely fluent, and I guess Talinn isn’t the only interesting city and... oh, wait, it says I have mail?

One thing that seems to happen at ALL the agencies is that it does not take long at all for you to get your first messages. In eight years of trying online match services here, I can count the number of times I had a woman initiate contact without running out of fingers and toes. Not so here.

But there’s a catch. You need to purchase “points” (or tokens or coupons or whatever) just to open any of these messages. You can buy one, or several at once, or a veritable fistful, with a discount for bulk purchases. They are, perhaps, US$8 each, and you need one just to open each letter. Let’s sign off for now and thing about it more later...

But tomorrow comes and you check in again and there are now some ten messages sitting there and so far to make this all happen, you have done nothing. You can click on the profile of each of the women sending you messages, and tell pretty quickly some of these are, shall we say, not keepers? The 21 year old gal with the cute smile who mentions in her profile that she will not touch any alcohol because she is pregnant right now, but ordinarily enjoys a nice glass of wine on a sunset scene over the ocean. And she speaks no English whatsoever. You kind of feel a little sorry for her... but this isn’t the starting place for a good romance. But there is no way to send her even a polite no thank you without spending a point to read her message and another to reply. So you don’t. Maybe you delete the message unread right now, maybe you wait for another time so at least it doesn’t come across as a slap to her, but US$16 just to be polite and read her message and respond nicely to it that no thanks? It seems a bit much.

You go through this for a few days, with lots of messages piling up, some from possibly interesting women, quite a few from total non-matches. It gets easier, and even arguably more necessary, to delete without reading lots and lots of messages. But it is all online and just little pictures, so it’s not like you are really snubbing a real person, right?

How I wish this was not the way things were. A complaint I hear time and again from female friends is the way many men treat women online as if there were not real and commit acts of rudeness they would never even contemplate in person. Getting dumped by text message, for example. Yet here you are practically driven into at least some basic rudeness.

After a little while when your profile is no longer quite so fresh, the pace of new messages slows, but every single time you log on, there’s at least one more totally new person writing. You find some of the potentially more interesting, open and read the very short message, you start a little dialogue... and discover that it costs a point to write a 2500 character message. And 2500 characters means including spaces, puncutation, everything. You cannot write much of a message at all, and that longer fuller response you really want to send would enjoy costing US$24 just to say something about your weekend and the kind of things you normally do in your free time and enjoy, as a way of starting to introduce yourself.

Keep this up for a month with a few different interesting seeming gals, even being parsimonious with words, it can easily end up costing a heck of a lot of money. A lot of those interesting first leads peter off quickly as you find you are not meshing well, or have very different values in some key areas that were not obvious. You’ve spent $100 to chase a dead end lead instead of the $2-$10 doing the same online at home might cost. This is NOT progress!

It is hard to break out of the situation. Maybe there is one interesting seeming gal and you really want to write her a much longer letter and get to know her better, but when you send her your e-mail address, it gets deleted out of the message. You send her a URL that shows the kind of work you do, and that gets deleted from the message. The agency is based on the model of you writing each other, and them collecting money from you for this. They ban sharing e-mail addresses, won’t provide a postal address even on request, and in short, run things so you have to use their internet connection, their mail service, and pay their fees to do so.

Now to be fair, this is just their business model and they are providing a lot of free services... which your point purchases carry. By making you pay for reading and sending messages both, all costs are on you, which given the cost of translation and computer service and so on and the relative value of the Russian ruble (or Ukrainian grivna or the Krygy currency or whatever) to the dollar is hardly unfair. Translation, if done well, is not easy and translators need to be paid for their work. What’s more, most of the translation work is a loss leader: all those profiles no one pays for, all those messages women send that never get read and hence never paid for. Your one point is carrying along all those expenses to the agency and this is their main source of income. So having made an investment in providing this introduction, they have some claim to your support.

Suddenly you’ve blown a couple hundred dollars in a month and have one interesting person you can barely write to to show for it.

Let’s look at Agency Number Two. This provides some very basic free services (Here we go again, eh?), but instead of a point system, you can browse for free, perhaps even post a profile for free, and there might even be a way to open messages for free. But to browse their recent member catalog, you need to pay a subscription fee, which gives you three months or six months, or some such, and gives you unlimited access to the system. You can send one message, you can send fifty, you can hear from twenty women and write every single one of them back, even just a nice polite thanks for your note. There might even be a way to send a free, even without a subscription, thanks but no thanks form letter. And there is a lot more information about what to expect, what happens if things work out with someone you meet here and what you need to do, links to sites with more information, links to tour agencies that specialize in travel to Russia, and so on. It may or may not say so, but the women posting to this site have paid at least some nominal fee to be listed, and that means a greater many less profiles, but a clear shift in their tone and tenor: You’ll find much more thoughtful profiles (still pretty goal oriented and very clearly centered on relationships, mind you, but there’s not the 18-year-olds trying this out for a lark, and the profiles have much more written content and specifics about interests and personality). What's more, the costs you do incur are not carrying the weight of all those translations of all those profiles. The women have paid to have their profile listed and translated into English to be readable by you.

Again, you will get messages not too long after you first post a profile, but it is not quite the wildebeest stampede of Agency Number One. You may also see something like CONFIRMED PROFILE on some if not all the listings, which a little reading reveals means that a person from the agency has met the woman who posted the profile, so you know the profile you see is a real person and the specifics in the profile are accurate (or at least accurate-ish: I met a gal whose pretty near eye level with me, which means she’s got to be close to 6'1", but she’s listed as 5'7". Someone rounded down, converted from metric, and rounded down again, I think.).

There’s a little catch here, but it is laid out quite clearly. Your subscription gives you access to their full listings, and in particular to new members, but what you send is exactly what she gets. If you write in English, she gets your message in English. No deleting e-mail address, no removing the word "internet" everywhere it appears, but not translation either. They offer a for-fee translation service. Do the math and you quickly work out it is going to cost you to write in Russian, but it will end up being a great deal less expensive than Agency Number One. What’s more, you have a lot more creative freedom here to say what you want at the length you feel is more natural. There’s also information on what to do and say to make the best first impression, how some of the manners of introductions through the cultural differences work and things it is best to say and topics to not start with in an initial letter, and so on. This is, in short, a place for people who are serious, not for just hanging around to chat and idly see what happens.

Now I could make up more examples of different kinds of introduction agencies, but these two examples probably capture much of the range of what international matching services look like.

To sum it all up in a sentence: You have to follow the money to understand the site and how it works.

Note that I have not said anything about scams. Both these services (and the examples are based on two real agencies) are completely legitimate and on the up and up. But with the model of free membership, it would be quite easy for a scam artist to set up a free fake profile (or dozens of them), write some canned letters to new members (since there were no costs to the women, they could also do this for free), automate the entire process to send hundreds of canned messages from dozens of fake profiles to all the new members and see what they come up with. Even if only one in a thousand falls for it, they've had almost no fiscal outlay to haul in as much as they can take this guy for...

And this is a good way to put to rest the whole idea of scamming. Anyone who asks you for money is almost certainly a scammer. You should never ever send a woman money if you have not actually met and do not yet know her. It is not something they have any reason to ask for, and if they do, the answer is no. A women who looks like a 25-year-old Catherine Zeta-Jones in skimpy outfit and breasts almost falling out of the clothing (and perhaps not even just almost) who professes complete and utter undying love for you somewhere around character 4000... Yeah, not likely. In fairness you may see some completely legitmate ads with women dressed rather a bit more skimpily that common decorum suggests: There is an annoying myth that posing in a revealing way in revealing clothings will get you more letters and attention from worthy men. It does get the gal more letters and attention, but the “from worthy men” part is questionable. Now she has a lot of offers to reject rather than only getting something good. I would treat any ad with a woman flaggrantly showing you what she got with a certain amount of caution. It might be misplaced caution, but better to tread cautiously and see what happens when you write her (if you do). If she asks for money in the second letter, you’re being taken for a ride.

That 25-year-old Catherine Zeta-Jones is not a made up example, by the way. One team of scammers used a publicity photograph in just that way. Usually they use models from Russia so at least you have the defense of not realizing that you are looking at a very famous (to them) runway model from Moscow. These guys weren’t even that careful. And still hauled in a few cool thousand from a gullible man.

The second agency example is a highly rated matching agency, something you can verify with some searching on the web for unsponspored comments, ratings, and so on. The agency is not free, to women or men, which filters out a lot of scammers right there. The agency has roots in Russia and can and does verify the women’s bona fides. The site offers links into a good many other sources of useful information to help you understand what you are getting into, dating situations and ettiquette issues, and so on.

Much of this, including information on how to spot scams, blacklists of sites that are infested with scammers, some of the kinds of angles they use, etc can be found online at, among other places, the Russian Brides Cyber Guide. If you are at all interested in the topic of international matching, whether it is idle curiousity about what it is all about, or you are a reporter following a story on scams, or you happen to be a seriously interested potential suitor, I can highly recommend this site. I am sure there are others of merit along the same basic lines too.

I’ve tried to address some of the aspects of international match making services. They are really more like an online dating site, but with a special topical theme (albeit that the international aspects mean there’s a lot more to it than the average special interest community). They are not agencies engaged in human trafficing: They make their money from introductions and tours, not in bringing people overseas. They are not soliciting. And while some may be plagued with scammers, they are not likely to be scamming agencies in and of themselves. It’s not hard to spot a scam (Think of ease with which you are find and toss out spam from your e-mail, for example.) and there are lots of good resources about scams and scammers you can read to understand how scams work and how to avoid them.

By and large, the introduction agencies are honest. But some are better than others, and so go to considerable effort to root out any false ads while others put no effort into pruning out false information. Check scamming blacklists and online ratings to tell the good from the bad, and also remember to look at the economic model. It will tell you almost everything you need to know right there about the kind of quality and service you can expect.

posted by Anonymous Jack @ 3:20 PM