One of the nastiest aspects of the international dating industry is the myth of the submissive mail order bride. This myth is misleading and potentially tragic, but it is also simply wrong.
This myth seems to have started on international dating sites who really don’t understand why a man from the US, EU or other economically developed country would be looking for a foreign girlfriend. These sites are often run by women who don’t really understand why men from the United States and other Western nations are looking for foreign brides, so they dismiss the submissive wife hoax as part of their promotion to interested men. This hype is disingenuous and often plants the seeds of failure in the relationship early on.
First, the beginning of the rise of modern international marriage began with the collapse of the Soviet Union and anyone who has met many Eastern European women can tell you that, as a rule, they are anything but submissive. Remember, the Soviet Union officially opposed sex discrimination and allowed women access to all kinds of professions that were closed to them in most other countries. This egalitarianism paid off during World War II, with thousands of women serving in Soviet combat units. The highest-scoring Soviet female sniper, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, was credited with 309 kills, but that’s not the model of Russian femininity that the owners of most international dating agencies want to portray.
During World War I, the Russian Revolution, World War II, and the other horrors of the 20th century, some sixty million men from the countries of the former Soviet bloc perished. Women held an enormous amount of power in everyday life and developed real confidence in their own abilities, because women outnumbered men in much of Eastern Europe during the years after 1945. Furthermore, the low rate In much of the former Soviet bloc since the early 1960s there is more evidence that women were forcibly controlling their own destiny. So there is actually more evidence that, as a general rule, women in the former Soviet bloc are more independent, confident, and even liberated, although that is a loaded term, than women in the US or the EU.
More specifically, no matter where a woman is from, it takes confidence and intelligence for a girl to reject men in her own country and decide instead to try to marry a man from another country. She may face dire economic or social conditions, but it still takes guts.
Local men do not like their most beautiful and talented women marrying foreigners, and indeed, only in the most liberated countries can women try to improve their lot by marrying foreigners. There are no websites for women from Yemen or other poor conservative Muslim nations, because women have little to no power in those countries. It is almost impossible for them to find a way out of those patriarchal societies.
Regardless of where she is from, it is a mistake to assume that a mail order bride will be friendly and submissive just because she is looking for a foreign husband. In fact, it would be best to assume that any girl willing to give up everything she’s ever known in order to seek love and a better life abroad is a girl with more than a little worth. She has to have the guts to take a chance and a man would be wise if he treated her with respect for having the guts to make that decision. Otherwise, the relationship is pretty much doomed from the start.