Russian Women Myths

Western culture believes many Russian women myths that deserve to be addressed. For instance, many Americans believe...

• That there is a such thing as a "Russian mail order bride"
• That Russian women just want to marry an American so that they can come to America
• That most men who pursue Russian women do so because they are losers who can't score with American women

For all practical purposes, these so-called "Russian Women Myths" are just that: Myths.

Click here to share your thoughts about these Russian women myths with visitors to this page!

Russian Mail Order Bride

One of the big Russian women myths I will address is that there is even such a thing as a "Russian Mail Order Bride". I could speculate as to why the term "mail order bride" continues to be used and would hit the nail on the head. I'll get to that in a moment, but for now let me just clear this up as directly as possible: By no normal use of the modern English language is there such a thing as a Russian "MAIL ORDER BRIDE" (or Ukrainian, Filipino, Thai, or South American for that matter). Period. The concept is patently ridiculous.

There are services that specialize in introducing Western men to foreign women, but no one "mail orders" a "bride". It works nearly 100% like Match.com, eHarmony.com, Chemistry.com, or any other online dating site with which you may be familiar, or the "personal ads" in newspapers before the internet existed.

Western men browse websites where Russian women (or other foreign women) post profiles announcing their availability and desire to find a man for marriage, just like Match.com. They contact the Russian women that interest them, and the women who are interested reply. That's it. No FedEx packages arriving from Russia!

Since many Russian women either do not have convenient access to a computer or internet (though this number is shrinking), and many do not speak adequate English to communicate meaningfully with Americans directly, there are also "marriage agencies" that run offices in Russian cities where they help Western men and local women meet and communicate, but even that works much the same way as Match.com. You pick women from a website that you would like to meet, the local agency representing the girls you select calls them to ask if they would be interested in meeting you, and they agree or not. If they agree, they meet you, but even that doesn't guarantee they'll meet you a second time, let alone marry you.

Men do pay fees to use these sites or local services, just like Match.com, but to somehow extrapolate from that that one is paying to purchase a wife is quite a leap.

If words have any meaning at all, there is no such thing as a Russian mail order bride. Of all Russian women myths, this is one of the most frustrating one because it carries so many despicable implications.

Russian Women Marrying to come to America

Another of the big Russian women myths that persists is that Russian women want so badly to come to America that they are willing to marry an American man even if they have no intentions of staying with him or starting a family.

Sure. It happens. Some Russian women marry American men just for the citizenship. They've seen the TV show "Dallas". They've seen the movie "Home Alone", set in a million dollar Chicago estate. They assume these examples are the typical American experience and want their share of that pie and will do almost anything to get it.

But my own observations suggest that one's odds of finding a local who would marry for ulterior motives seem much greater than the odds of finding a Russian woman who would marry a man just to get to America.

And think about this... In order for a Russian woman to be able to legally immigrate to the U.S. through marriage and get her citizenship such that she can be a legal citizen without remaining married, she would need to marry the man, move to a country where she doesn't know a single soul other than her husband, where she barely speaks the local language (if at all), where she is almost completely vulnerable, helpless, and dependent on her husband for PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING, and have regular sex with him for at least two years.

It does happen, but for a Russian woman to be able to pull that off she would need to have a fairly serious case of Antisocial Personality Disorder that nearly any balanced man should be able to identify and avoid long before she would ever get her citizenship!

I know far more Russian/Ukrainian women who moved to the U.S. on a fiancee visa only to return home unmarried than I do women who suffered two years of humiliation in order to obtain citizenship.

Men who pursue Russian women are losers...

Although not technically among "Russian WOMEN myths", another related myth is that men who pursue Russian women do so only because they can't attract and marry an American woman and heard that Russian women were more desperate and therefore easier.

My exposure to men who seek or sought Russian women would indicate that most of them were very normal, balanced, intelligent, and decent guys. I've met doctors, lawyers, commercial real estate developers, business owners, inventors, computing professionals, and engineers. Almost all of them were between 40 and 60 years old, and most of them were married before, so clearly they weren't completely incapable of landing a local girl.

Of course there are the social misfits as in any group, but most are just normal guys disappointed in their local options who heard good things about Russian women and took a chance.

WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON HERE?

All of the Russian women myths I address here are widely held beliefs in America. But as with any other kind of myths, it is helpful to examine Russian women myths to determine the source of these fallacious beliefs.

For instance, it is interesting to ask: How many people who hold beliefs like these have ever personally been acquainted with Russian women, or have been to Russia or Ukraine to see first hand what the people there are like, or know American men who have pursued and/or married Russian women?

I'd bet practically NONE have had this exposure. Maybe they saw a TV documentary, or knew someone who knew someone who heard about someone who had a bad experience with pursuing/marrying a Russian woman. But without a shred of reliable evidence they tenaciously cling to these incredibly insulting opinions on a topic about which they know absolutely nothing.

That fact alone ought to be a pretty good clue that something else is really going on here that continues to give life to such tenacious faith in these Russian women myths!

Just quickly scan the section headers above... Do you notice a theme? I do. It sounds to me like the propaganda of a feminized, chickified, Oprah Winfrey culture trying to make sure that men don't get any funny ideas about doing a little comparison shopping.

They probably realize that if men shopped around and compared foreign women with local women, the locals might actually need to do something to COMPETE... for STARTERS they might need to do ridiculous things like BE NICE, lose a few pounds, and drop about 80% of their "must have" qualifications for the men they seek!

I have a perfect example from my own experience to illustrate this phenomenon...

I attended a specialized graduate school with a student body composed of 1500 students, 250 of whom were women. The on-campus community was even more disproportionate. Among the singles segment of this population, the women HAD IT MADE with their somewhat "captive audience". They came from much larger, more balanced university campuses where they were just faces in the crowd, but at this school they were immediately in HIGH DEMAND, and it often went to their heads.

All of a sudden they became picky princesses too good for just any regular guy, and unable to decide between their many pursuers - men who would easily be considered out of their league back at their undergraduate university campuses.

UNTIL, THAT IS, when the on-campus male dorm guys discovered the nearby nursing school.... Yup, just a mere 5 minute walk from our school was a huge hospital with an in-house nursing school that had hundreds of female nursing students, and hardly any straight men. It was our school in reverse.

There, women who were much nicer looking than average, who received more attention than they knew what to do with on their larger more balanced university campuses all of a sudden were high and dry, with 50 women for every man.

Their path was the opposite that of the girls from my school... many of them WERE picky princesses on their large university campuses, but quickly adjusted and became a lot more reasonable. Then they felt privileged to receive attention from nearly any normal, decent, straight guy.

Well, when the single men at our school and the nursing students "found each other" and started arranging big social events together, the women from our school grew fangs and started the equivalent of Russian women myths about the nursing students and the guys who fraternized with them. And any man known to fraternize with the nursing school women was blacklisted from our school's social scene. Does any of this sound familiar?

Clearly they realized that their newfound "power status" was in serious jeopardy as a result of the COMPETITION! And that threat of competition is at the root of all of the Russian women myths!