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My dear readers, I know many of you are enamored with the beauty of Eastern European women from Russia and the Ukraine. Many of you dream of this blissful fantasy relationship, where an innocent, wide-blue-eyed, dirty blonde with a waifish figure showers you with kisses at the airport and says “dahling, dahling, dahling” as only an Eastern European could. She then comes home with you and has fabulous sex, keeps your house clean and gives birth to two beautiful, smart, well-behaved children, all without a single complaint.
All this for the price of a visa and an airline ticket. What a deal! If only life could be so easy.
Like currency traders who seek to exploit weak currencies abroad, many think that their relative wealth as North Americans gives them greater “buying power” on the market for international women. Some men love Asian women. Others love European women. They prefer anything over the North American woman who has found them wanting or whom they find overly demanding.
The inherent problem with overseas transactions for marriage is the lack of proximity and the lack of ability to learn anything about the background of the person in whom you are interested. In any truly intimate relationship, you cannot and should not just take the other person’s word for who they are and what they stand for.
We know people by the company they keep, in many instances. Without spending large amounts of time with your love interest’s family and associates, you get a very narrow vision of who he or she is. A large part of who we are as individuals involves who we are to those around us. This works both ways. We have seen situations where the foreigner (or syndicate they are involved with) abuses the system, but also where the North American who imports a spouse has misrepresented himself and his means. Thus, these foreign connections are inherently exposed to the potential for exploitation.
Recently, I had heard of a friend of a friend who had spent several months exchanging emotion-laden emails with a Ukrainian woman. He felt sure this beautiful women, 15 years his junior, who appeared to be madly in love with him, was going to be his future wife. From reading some of the emails, it was quite clear that she did not care that he had average looks, a beer belly, a ho-hum job and a prior wife and kids. She was talking of how great is was going to be to meet at the airport for the first time. She went on and on, paragraph after paragraph about how exciting their relationship would be. These two people had never talked on the phone or even Skyped.
Now, before you immediately judge this gentleman to be a “chump”, realize that we can all be vulnerable when it comes to love. A starved dog will eat just about anything. Internet dating fraud is perpetuated by men and women alike. When someone manages to dial into our psyche so perfectly, we can fall for it. The answer is not to become jaded or paranoid, but just to be careful.
Dating is not a sprint. This why I love the idea of courtship. It gives the parties a huge opportunity to get to know each other, their families, their work associates and their friends. It simply cannot be done electronically.
The moral of the story is “date local”, unless you are willing to spend the money and the tons of time learning about the person you are interested in.
What happened with the FoF? (Friend of Friend). I had the opportunity to read some of the flowery emails that were almost perfect in their imperfect English. I selected a couple of oddly phrased sentences from one of the Russian’s emails. I googled those sentences en bloc. Voila!
What turned up is that those exact emails, with only the names changed, had been written to numerous men the world over from all sorts of women with different names. Yes, it was a fraud. It seems these emails were used over and over to feed the egos of North American men. They had been very cleverly written. How or why is unknown. What is known is that this was not a genuine, heartfelt relationship, on one side. The FoF was hurt, but thankful to find out before it had gone further.
As always readers, I’m hoping you find love and happiness!
