Post-Soviet Dating

Myths about Women

In my previous (serious) post, I talked a bit about some of the myths about the kind of men who use international match making sites. Like most myths, there's some truth to some things, but a lot of misinformation and mischaracterizations. There are men that are serial abusers, there are men who are losers and jerks, there are men who go to the former Soviet republics for sex tourism. I hope I've cast some light on these in my earlier column, and discussed something about the typical motivation of men.

So what's in for women? What are they doing this for? Some of the myths here are that they are money grubbers looking for a sugar daddy, or just poor and pathetic and prepared to do anything to escape the wretched misery of their lives in backward terrible awful Russia, or perhaps have some links to criminal activities (human trafficking, prostitution, etc.).

Let's start with the first myth: Russian women are miserable and would do anything to escape their horrendous situation.

Sorry, but that's a lot of propaganda. Remember them there Ruskies were the bad guys for decades. We were the good guys. So everything American is superior and everything Russian is inferior, right?

Now I am not about to sweep the communist past under the carpet and pretend that things that did happen didn't. Nor am I going to espouse that Russia is some grand wonderful economically vibrant worker's paradise. Living conditions there are very different and they conform in some ways to things we in the west might superficially see as highly impoverished. Russians are not ones to look at life through rose coloured glasses in quite the optimistic way that is more common in the West (and most especially in the United States). No one who stood in line for three hours after school each day to find out what was for sale that day and once a month had a big celebration because they came home with a quarter kilogram of butter for the first time in a month is under any delusions that this is the way things are supposed to be. Russians accept that a hard life is pretty much what they can expect. Or as my mother put it, it is the only place in the world where they could get away with not paying the army for six months and not have a revolution, because it is just expected that things can and will be bad.

But things are good deal better than in years past, and there are lot of standard western sources of anxiety that are just not present at all there. The days of truly terrible food scarcity are largely gone (though some problems do remain, and Russians rely on their homegrown produce far more than we do as it is not a supermarket economy). Their society is much more communal than our own: people tend to help each other in ways major and minor routinely in ways uncommon here. When they say they have an apartment, they mean they own it typically. No mortgage. Or if they do rent, the rent is much more commiserate with their income. Most places I traveled cars were rare (The bigger cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg are very different in this regard, and have traffic jams on par with the worst of American cities.), but public transport was reliable, frequent, went most places you needed it, and not too terribly expensive. The street cars might well look like relics from the 40s, but they run and they run on time and unlike American cities that ditches their electric street cars decades ago and now wish they had not, they are there. Several larger cities have good metros on par with Washington's Metro system, the Chicago L, the Boston T, or New York subways. Passenger trains run to many more cities and serve them far better than Amtrak does in the U.S. No car payments, no having a cow sidewise when gasoline hits $3 a gallon. A person making the equivalent of $500 a month there might well actually have much more freedom to spend on themselves than someone making $5000 a month in the States.

I could go on and on about this, but suffice it to say, you'll find very few people shrieking with a desperate desire to escape home. On the contrary, it is a major undertaking and sacrifice for them to be willing to consider setting all that aside for the unknown. Sure they are curious and they've seen Western TV so they have some bizarre ideas about what life might be like here (Imagine understanding America from watching Friends and Xena: Warrior Princess!). But these are not people willing to give their all in the name of having an automatic dishwasher.

Or at least not in general. You will find those who are rather enamored of the Western style and think marriage is the way to get that. Think about it from your own perspective for a moment: would you be willing to disconnect from everything you know in your life and move to a foreign country with strange habits, language, and expectations just because you think there is some economic payoff? Almost certainly not. Russians and Americans may be different in some ways, but we are all human and there is more we have in common than not. Russian women seek a worth man, not a worthy wallet.

You will hear horror stories of women who come here and disappear the instant they get a Green Card, or fake tales of abuse and seek legal protection as soon as their permanent residence status comes through. Sad to say, this does happen. I know at least one instance (the son of a friend of my mother's) where the man met and married the love of his life from Thailand and five years later, she just up and disappeared. But these are more the exception than the rule. Most women come in honest desire to have a working marriage with a worthy man, to have children, and to go grow old together. They seek the worthy man, and are willing to consider someone from overseas to make that possible. But presented with a chance to meet and marry someone more local who seems worthy, they will not pass him up in the name of life with hamburgers and SUVs.

There's also the myth that even in working relationships, there are money grubbers who stay with their man so he will feed their hedonistic capitalist consumerist desires. Stories such as the Russian wife who sulks for hours after her husband said "No" firmly and unequivocally when she asked for some expensive piece of crystal crap (cut crystal in the shape of a leaping deer or something equally tacky and pointlessly expensive knick knack). I don't know the facts of the case of this particular real example, but posit the following possible explanation: She may just not be quite clued in to our society.

Remember things like credit cards are totally alien to them, and credit card companies make a good business from convincing people that delaying gratification is a bad idea. If all you see is that you can wave a piece of plastic at a $3000 item and it's yours here and now, and don't see that making minimum payments at 18% per annum means that $3000 item is going to be more like $15000 over the next ten to fifteen years... Well, you can see how someone might be miffed that you say no when yes seems so straightforward and easy. They don't have some of the developed armour to advertising and mass culture clutter that we develop from living in a culture saturated in opportunities for quick gratification and massive subsequent repentance.

Not that I am anti-capitalistic, but it's easy for me to resist certain kinds of crap being aimed at me because I have some natural suspicions. Lacking those defenses, it is easy to succumb to certain temptations, and it is easy to misinterpret that as money grubbing and sulking for not getting some pretty little piece of trash when it may be merely as something as innocent as not having a grasp of our consumer culture and the defenses against it that are totally natural to us on a day to day basis.

The other myth that pops up somewhat more rarely is about prostitution, human trafficking, and criminal activity. By and large these are the acts of scammers (who are more likely to actually be men with computers posing as fake women online), and I'll address this more in a future post about the Myths About Agencies.

But let me tackle the prostitution one quickly here before signing off. I have no idea where this one comes from, but prostitution is about money, and getting money right now for immediate needs. It is usually an act of economic desperation and thus something that needs immediate payoffs. As I will discuss things in future posts, fiscally there is nothing in this for women. If they are asking you for money, chances are good you're being scammed, not that she's a real person really interested in marriage. Money just does not change hands, and even in those instances where it might, we are talking about things that will weeks if not months or years down the road. This is not something a women selling herself is looking for: she has real and immediate needs (most often) and this is just not where it happens. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that any women using international marriage agencies are actually running sex for money operations. At best, this is something a sex tourist might try to tell himself to justify his caddish behavior.

In my experience, and the experience of everyone I know and have talked to about this subject (save the one exception of the extended family friend whose wife from Thailand nicked off after a few years of marriage when she got her papers), the intentions of the real women looking for international marriages are sincere. There are manipulative money seekers, there are those planning to cut and run, and there are scammers. I'll talk a little more about these topics in later columns to help you spot and avoid them. But they are not the predominate force within good agencies, and there are some telling signs of this to warn you to be wary. I save these topics for the future.

posted by Anonymous Jack @ 12:30 PM