Most of us are quick to mock the mail-order marriage market.
But could these guys be having the last laugh?
Fashions in spam email seem to wax and wane along with the volume. Once it was bathtub Viagra and sure-fire super-sizing solutions (how do they know???) that peppered my inbox, these days it’s purveyors of online casinos that seem keenest to clog it.
And, I thought like most people, I’ve never read any of it beyond a quick shufti at the titles in my spam folder before I empty it. An eclectic mixture of medically dubious promises, poorly spelt attempts to imitate correspondence from banks I don’t use, the occasional “would like to meet” from somewhere unpronounceable and, of course, that Nigerian lawyer with a multi-million dollar estate to divest if I can help him out with a few quid, all flushed into the ether with a disinterested mouse-click.
Of course not everyone is so discerning or disinterested. We’ve all seen the occasional headlines – Oregon woman loses $400,000 to Nigerian email scam and the like. Yes, the Lads from Lagos do occasionally strike it lucky. But surely these are rare exceptions? Surely the odds of making money from spam email are longer than those of winning the lottery? Surely there can only be a handful of schmucks gullible enough to be suckered in by this stuff? Or indeed bored enough to read the dratted things in the first place?
The other thing on the spammers’ side is that there are actually a lot more idiots out there than you may think.
Like a mate of mine, for example, who I’ve recently discovered has been quite active in following up on some of his spam.
Specifically those “Russian Bride” emails.
Looking for love
There’s a vast army of the lovelorn out there, and in our increasingly impersonally-connected world their numbers seem to be on the rise. And whether it’s Thai takeaways, contact sites, dating agencies or mail order Russian brides there are an army of “entrepreneurs” just waiting to make a profit out of them. Not to mention an awful lot of people like me just waiting to rip the piss out of them as well.
In my own life I’ve occasionally brushed against the consumer end of the mail-order marriage market. A colleague in my first job had picked up a Filipino bride on a trip around the world, a sailing buddy met a hairdresser in Bangkok and ended up marrying her, another workmate met his wife in an Internet chat-room and was engaged before they’d ever met in person. And now it seems another of my mates is going down the same road, fishing for a shop-bought sweetheart in the ecommerce love-emporium of the World Wide Web.
I can rattle off a patronising arm-chair psychologist’s explanation for each of these. Once described as having the “inter-personal skills of a rat” that one-time colleague with the Filipino bride would have a hard job attracting a partner without a stacked deck. The one who met his wife on the Internet I doubt ever had the cojones to ask a woman out in person. That sailing bud with the take-away Thai hairdresser was one of those vegetarian, caring, nurturing, child-of-nature types who I don’t doubt for a second has been chewed up and spat out by a succession of manipulative and mercenary woman. As to my mate who is currently pursuing Russia’s finest, well, a messy divorce has certainly scarred him more than somewhat.
I’m not alone in casting a slightly smug glance in the direction of those who have imported their love-life from a third-world country or met their partner on the Internet. Hypocritically so you may think, given the lamentable state of my own love-life. It doesn’t seem to matter whether you met your partner in a bar, nightclub, office, supermarket or gym, nor how second-rate your relationship may be, if you hit on a girl you liked face-to-face and ended up together your story makes the A-list. You command respect (of sorts). Any other story just doesn’t measure up.
But it’s more than just the romance and the sense of story of it all. There’s something slightly seedy about these contrived, long-distance hook-ups; something calculated and mercenary. True love should be an equitable quid pro quo – you should both be with each other for the same reason, namely your love for each other. These cases are rather grubby by comparison – a shallow meeting of lovelorn desperation with a mercantile desire for a better quality of life. It smacks more of slavery and prostitution than of love.
Yet in my experience those untroubled by being on the love story B-list and who are unfazed by the occasional ribbing from friends and colleagues seem to be making a pretty good fist of their love lives. However cynical I may be about how they came about, all the guys I know who met their partners this way appear to he happy and their relationships appear to be going strong. Which compares rather favourably with the rest of us, or at least it does with me.
And so I ask myself … have these guys got it right?
Defining love
The problem here for the cynical and supercilious amongst us is that we are viewing relationships through an unreal prism, through a prism of romance and of true love that simply isn’t the reality for, well, pretty much everyone it seems.
Take a look at the statistics. Attrition rates are hard to pin down but give or take 10% or so half of marriages in America are destined for the divorce courts and over 40% of those in the UK will go the same way. Infidelity statistics are even harder to pin down but most reports put them well above the divorce rate.
Take a good look at your friends. How many of their relationships, when you dig a little, smack of true love and just how many are more reminiscent of Stockholm Syndrome?
Viewed through the prism of the reality of dismal and unhappy marriages, of resentment, of cheating and often divorce, the Thai takeaway and mail-order bride brigade don’t look too shabby to me. It might not be an equitable quid pro quo, but it’s a defined quid pro quo where both understand their own needs and come together to meet each other’s needs. It might not be a conventional view of true love but it is at least mature and informed. And some may say that’s a more promising starting point for a relationship than seeing someone you fancy across a bar when you’ve had a skin-full.
Disregarding love
Well, I’m not convinced it would be right for me, though I’ve never been the needy type. For me a relationship should be more than the sum of the parts, a meeting and a mating where each gets more out of it than they put in to it and one driven by want rather than by need. If it happens, it happens, and if it doesn’t, well that’s just fine too.
Will my friend find love with his Russian Bride, or at least a happy and contented form of it? As a friend I wish him well and hope for the best though my expectations aren’t great. And as an observer of life I guess I win either way. I’m rather keen to see how his story unfolds.