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2001-06-07 | 3:23 p.m.

Duff sent me to a web site called "Belarus Brides" where the women are sorted by cup size. We send each other things all day long. It lets us stay in touch.

So I started reading it and within minutes I wanted to personally find matches for the women. I want to rescue them all from Vitebsk. I saw a documentary on PBS that showed some of the guys going in for these services, and then showed how some of their marriages had collapsed within a short time. To be honest, a lot of the guys are schlubs. (I'm sure there are plenty non-schlubs who go in for it, too, but there's no particular reason to feature THEM in a documentary.) You know the type. You meet them because they're somebody's cousin's brother-in-law and after talking to them for five minutes, you're ready to fake an epileptic seizure just to create a diversion. (Or maybe it's just me.) Anyway, once these foreign women are married for a certain length of time, they can get divorced and continue to live here in the U.S. and meet men on their own terms.

These guys keep talking about love, love, loooooooooooooooove and you look into the eyes of these Ukrainian women and you just know. You know exactly why they did this and you know a little, but only a little, of what they are going through. And no matter what awful things the schlubs say about American women, it seems the Ukrainian women want the same damn things we want. We are not so different after all.

Now to give credit to the Belarus agency I mentioned, which is run by Belarussians along with an American man in Akron (who is engaged to one of the Belarussian women running the agency), they claim to do things differently; to be a kinder, gentler sort of matchmaking agency. They don't have big socials where men draw up shopping lists, for one thing. They say they will help the couple with the transition after they are married. But don't forget, they do arrange their clients by cup size. And if you dig around a bit, you'll discover a diatribe against American women on the site that goes like this:

Most American and Western women only want marriage to divorce later and live off child support and alimony. Most American women are drunks, depressed, taking anti depression medication, or both. They don't care about their appearance after they are married. They don't care about YOU after they are married. Almost all are completely spoiled. Here is a wonderful quote, said by a man who is a native of Belarus, speaking to an American visitor. His name is Anatoly Neverov, and he has a nice introduction agency in Minsk. I do not know Anatoly personally, but have seen his comments on a Russian marriage list, and he seems like a very good person. He said, "I have seen these American women. It is a pity that you must live among them!" This quote says it all.

When I read this, it made me feel really crappy. Am I too spoiled to marry a schlub? Yes, I think I am! So now I am a bad American woman, unloved by all. Okay, I can joke about this now, but it's taken me years of education and "consciousness-raising," to use the historical term, to recognize and understand that I really don't have to feel bad or culpable because the guy who wrote this can't get a date. If you're reading this and you think you'd like a wife from Russia or Ukraine or Belarus, fair enough. I wish you the very best. But if you're a schlub, don't fool yourself into thinking that she is acting out of love, not desperation. Don't fool yourself into thinking that we were wrong about you.

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