If you could clear a few things up for me here, I'd be grateful. Are you saying that no FSU girl who appears on an agency site (or agency dealing site such as Fiance.com, Elenasmodels etc) is genuinely seeking a husband? From the sounds of what you're suggesting, they're all in it for money, and a bloke will be lucky and/or extremely charming to convince her to put aside the scam life and settle down, emigrate or whatever. Is this your position? I only ask as there's more than a little ambiguity and perhaps contradiction between this position (if I'm reading you right) and some of the other posts you've made in other threads.
On another note, is there any value in the private investigators I occasionally see advertising? Specifically, those based in the "lady's" country. Is their service useful/affordable etc? I'd be interested if anyone has experience with this.
From my own experience most women on EM are genuine with maybe 5-10% being scammers or agency stooges. On a pay-per-letter site like Anastasia this % is more or less reversed - probably only 10-20% of the women are genuine. The thing is that the normal "economics" of the dating game apply here the same as anywhere else: the more desirable a women is the more options she has, thus the less likely she is to have settle for an older man of moderate means from another country.
The other thing you have to factor into the mix is that unlike western women, even a very intelligent ambitious FSU woman has little opportunity of achieving financial independence so she is culturally pre programmed to exploit her looks in a much more mercenary fashion than her western counterpart.
devilmaycare, even if there are 10%-20% real girls at anastasia (I am pretty sure no more than 5%), you guys never go after that minority, most of men will be trapped by the rest 80%-90% sexy profiles which are very active and totally manipulated by local agencies affiliated to anastasia or dream-marriage and they will be instantly sending letters and invite you to chat.
Muzzy, yes, "a bloke will be lucky and/or extremely charming to convince her to put aside the scam life and settle down, emigrate or whatever"
I know few successful couples, those are 2 types:
1. came to Ukraine attracted by a scammer initially, but found out about scam fast and got introduced to some serious women by local agency and never used that agency for anything else, just 1st introduction.
2. men who didn't plan to meet a girl, but were here for some business and accidentally fall in love ;)
and.. to tell the truth I have also seen those who initially got scammed, but still married to those girls who were used by agency to scam them. And sure girls were part of the game, just liked the guys. But chances with those girls are very low.
pay per letter users believes that that girl from glamour photo is writing to him because she liked him:)
we have been always accepting any lady who want to be registered on fiance.com. no face or age restriction. the same for agencies who works with fiance.com, or mamba, or inkontakt, many other sites, they can put any of their members on the site. Today internet is almost everywhere. Ladies have access to it, and more and more ladies with independent internet access put their profile on our site. As I always say: agency is supposed to help women who do not know how to start to get married abroad. Agency is supposed to help ladies who do not know how to use internet, need help with translation and so on. In my opinion ladies should pay to agency for services too. And, as Alexander said, agency is supposed just help them with first introduction.
find a quality men candidate for a particular lady. not to use pay per letter cash machine to make money on fake letters.
If a you write to an agency girl 2-5 letters (free on fiance.com) and she is in love with you, then you ask her about phone number and she doesn¡¦t give it to you, dump her. We remove such profiles and delete such agency.
Sometimes ladies do not give a phone number, it is normal but at least we can arrange conf call via us , not the agency. Alexander and I know many cases when guys starts writing letters, get to know girls he wants to meet independently, then goes and meet them. Some agency/agent like you do a great job actually providing guides, taxi and everything.
I would never advise anybody to go and meet somebody you have no address, or have never talked on the phone.
Also, be smart and never give your email address in first letters, there are email collectors on each of this sites. Very rarely any normal girl will give you her private email in first message.
But as we all know, by reading our forum, or getting own live experience, even most real girls can scam you. Some of them would say it was not scam, it was just getting gifts form you:) not only girls form former soviet union. You girlfriend in your cityƒº So, it is everybody¡¦s own responsibility to be careful in his life.
to put it another way,
if you go after a girl who was way 'out of your league' in your own country,
the chances are very high your relations with her will be purely business in nature.
"if you go after a girl who was way 'out of your league' in your own country ..."
Well that's kind of the whole point of looking in the FSU. We are ALL here to get some combination of better looking/younger/better educated/higher social status woman than we would normally have access to back home. Anyone who claims any different isn't fooling anyone but themselves.
I must be fooling myself. I could have married a knock out blonde who was very well off. She was executive VP of a firm she was a partner in. Her old man was a wealthy person. I could have quit work and lived an easy life etc. etc. etc. This was just a couple years ago. For reasons of my own I decided to give her her papers. Just recently I was close with a lady who is a 10 in looks from an American view point. She was also just a bitch who was always right and never willing to compromise. When I told someone I had given up on american women he suggested FSU women. I figured there may be someone over there who has the qualities I desire in a person besides looks and brains. So for many devil you may be right. However, I would not agree 100% with you on this one.
At my advanced age (52, in a few days) I am going for my dream of fathering a baby. From a medical standpoint, my best odds to succeed will be if I can marry a woman 15+ years younger than I. In the FSU, this seems to be a real possibility.
I have looked at American dating websites: it is very rare that a woman is willing to meet a man more than 5 years older than she is.
Other differences that matter to me, from personal observation:
* on average, the women on the FSU websites are MUCH better educated than their American counterparts
* on average, FSU women are more hard-working
* on average, FSU women are more physically fit, and have a deep health consciousness
* the FSU mothers I have known and seen are caring and attentive in a way that is sadly rare in the US... they understand that mothering is their most important job, rather than one of their many pursuits, and they will do almost anything for their child's health and education
* God knows there are many materialistic vampires on the websites... but the culture "over there" has not yet become saturated with the lust for material possessions that is ruining my country: those of you who have spent time there, know that most people live in ways that are a lot simpler than Americans are used to, and have a different understanding of what is necessary and important in life
From all of these considerations, I believe that I have much better chances of making my dream come true in the FSU, than at home.
Actually.. if you look at MAMBA dating sites, you will find out that Russian-Ukrainian women almost never looking for someone more than 5-10 years older than them. Most of the 30-35 women already divorced and have kids and they are more likely to accept age difference over 10 years.
By the way... Colombian women are more OK about age difference and many of them have better values than Ukrainian women, as people in Columbia are more religious.
Colombian women are more OK about age difference and many of them have better values than Ukrainian women, as people in Columbia are more religious.
Thank you.
i've said this before and was accused of being a religions nut.
Spirituality does matter.
by the way, from my point of view, attractive ukranians are on the whole much more materialistic than americans. they have never had money so this is new to them.
most of the girls in america that i have known are more interested in finding love.
money doesn't impress them. they've had it all their life.
" ... has not yet become saturated with the lust for material possessions that is ruining my country"
I would say the exact opposite - I have never seen a culture more obsessed with trinkets, gadgets, fashion, celebrity and overt displays of wealth and status.
Beautiful and even average Ukrainian women are very materialistic... that is the fact... I have a friend, she's only 20. She has a mobile, but she wanted to buy new one, so I was hanging around with her for 3-4 hours and she eventually bought one of the most expensive for about $400 and still she was not very happy because she said something like - oh.. everybody at my university will have same model...
Women 22-25 are even worse about money. When girls are young they still can crazily fall in love and get married at 18-20, later they start to think with their brains, not the heart... so those who are 22-26 are not so easy to catch unless you have very good position in life, like place to live, good job, etc. You might see many divorced women with kids at age 26-28 at dating sites.
Close to 30 they start to be desperate as the nature tells them they must get a child before they are too old..
Men! Ukrainian women are very complicated with many psychological issues. I live in Ukraine almost 30 years, I only now start to understand how they work ))) But it's a bit of fun... If I go to Columbia, I know I am going to be a star there with my blue eyes and blond hair and I will be tall to their height standards ))))
There's so many different answers I've come across to that one.
1: I asked a guy who was showing me round the city in Kiev, and he said (in between telling me how much he loves The Pet Shop Boys!?) that if a woman acts up with a Ukraine man "she gets errr...." (he ran out of English at this point and simulated a punch in the face).
2: According to the book "Why Women Have Sex" (Cindy Meston, a clinical psychologist, and David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist), 73% of Russian women are in love, as opposed to 61% of Russian men, leaving 12% of women with no chance (assuming the population is evenly split, which most agencies will tell you it isn't), so there simply aren't enough 'good' FSU men to go around
3: They actually love their own men, and you and I are just walking ATMs.
I find that this answer changes dramatically on who you ask, even with the people who live there.
now think... when you walk around street in the evening in any city of Ukraine, who do you see there hanging around? there are much more women everywhere... why? because most of the men are hard working guys and have no time to play around.
@devilmaycare, who wrote: "I have never seen a culture more obsessed with trinkets, gadgets, fashion, celebrity and overt displays of wealth and status."
@alexander, who wrote: "Beautiful and even average Ukrainian women are very materialistic... that is the fact... I have a friend, she's only 20. She has a mobile, but she wanted to buy new one, so I was hanging around with her for 3-4 hours and she eventually bought one of the most expensive for about $400 and still she was not very happy because she said something like - oh.. everybody at my university will have same model..."
I don't pretend to be an expert on Russian culture - I am only a beginning student, and I doubt that I will ever understand deeply. But I can tell you what I have learned, and seen with my own eyes:
1) Many still living in Soviet-style apartments (little or no modernization, really primitive and worn-out by Western standards - especially the plumbing).
2) An amazing number of people (at least, in my favorite city of Saint Petersburg) still living in large communal apartments, where each family has a tiny room, and toilets/kitchens/etc. are all shared.
3) Folks who were really distressed when the Kyiv public transit fare increased from UAH 0.5 (about 10 cents) to UAH 2 (about 40 cents at the old exchange rate, 25 cents at the present exchange rate).
4) People who eat at restaurants less than once per year - it is too extravagant an expense (though they make some exception when traveling).
5) City dwellers who spend the equivalent of several work-weeks per year doing hard physical labor planting and harvesting in the village plot of a relative.
I could continue in the same vein...
What devilmaycare saw is real: this is the display you can see plastered all over the big city-centers of Russia and Ukraine. There are the luxury cars, billboards, and deluxe shops that are all the province of the very wealthy. A friend who visited a toy store in central Kyiv called it a "toy museum" ... she could not dream of paying such prices (and this shop was by no means the most expensive).
What you don't see, unless you spend some time with ordinary people, is that while they may regard these "glitterati" with some envy, their strongest reaction is genuine contempt. To the working people, these wealthy are the "new Russians" (NOT a term of admiration), or simply banda (gangsters). This is not so much of an exaggeration - many have accumulated their wealth by theft, bribery, etc.
The people who are used to leading simple lives, as I described above, of course would be happy to have more comforts. But I think that many of them understand that life can be happy without them, and have seen some parts of their world slide painfully downhill as incomes have increased.
The cancer of materialism is certainly spreading very fast in the FSU. In this regard, those under 25 (who have practically no memory of Soviet times) may perhaps turn out similar to their counterparts in the West. And of course lots of their elders have bought into "more more more." But it seems to me that many of those over 30, who were students in Soviet times, have some different expectations and priorities.
For me, pursuing 20-something women would be a waste of time and money for many good reasons ;) ... so their American-style attitudes towards status and wealth, are not a problem! (BTW, I met a splendid woman in Russia whose daughter was just starting college. Only recently, she was telling her daughter about some of the difficulties and privations of Soviet times, and said that it was difficult for her daughter to comprehend/believe what life was like around the time she was born.)
durak, honestly good luck. probably you want a white baby.
frankly speaking, you could increase your chances if you would be able to love a thai or phillapina girl.
i am saying that because i have spent some time in asia and know that caucasians have more of a 'wow' factor there.
in fsu, the glory is all but gone. i am in kiev now and i feel the dating scene here is a bit of a vultures nest. when i was in my early thrities i had some success. now i am 40 and i feel like a walking atm machine. i'm not sure anybody is taking me seriously.
just my experiences.
i had a much better time in bkk this year. i met some very nice girls who were definitely open to a relationship with an older man.
@gecko: Probably, I am an idiot, and my efforts will be met with humiliating and costly failure. Good, bad, or indifferent, I will post here, and let everyone know how I do! I haven't yet written here about my last two trips, in part because I am reluctant to open my heart, when a couple of guys here have recently acted so g**d*mned childish and negative.
I have met some of the Russian-speaking vampires, and I know how unpleasant this can be. (Thank heaven, this was a minority of my meetings.) But I have also met several women in their mid-30s who, I am confident, were decent and sincere, and focused more on finding a good partner, than "cashing in."
So I have not yet given up, on my fool's errand.
However, pigmentation means nothing to me. I love brown babies, coffee-colored babies, and every other variant of melanin. And some of the girls in Russia (more, I think, than in Ukraine) are obviously non-Russian - there is a real ethnic variety. I am fascinated by the Russian-speaking world, and somehow I feel that my years of Russian language study would be wasted if I were walking the streets of Bangkok, Manila, or even Bogota...
But in a few days, I will be freezing my ass off in northern Russia. I will probably be daydreaming about how pleasant the humid warmth of the Phillipines would feel...