If it’s okay to marry someone out of state, why do mail order brides get so much heat? Today, we’ll get to the bottom of the mail order bride popularity, discover where the concept came from, and explore the safest and most convenient ways to find mail order brides.
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What Is a Mail Order Bride? Let’s Define a Mail Order Bride!
Mail order bride is an outdated term, but for the lack of a better alternative, that’s what we call women who leave their countries to marry someone abroad.
The concept isn’t new, nor is it exclusive to the US. You might be surprised to learn that America, as we know it, would be impossible without the mail order brides who had been crossing the Atlantic since the 17th century to join the colonies and ensure their survival. The only way for men and women to connect was by mail, which took months to traverse the ocean. Singles advertised their desire to marry and arranged travel only to get married within hours of their first meeting. That’s where the “mail order bride” term comes from.
Do not confuse mail order brides with the mail order catalogs of the second half of the 20th century. You cannot pick a girl and have her delivered to your doorstep from halfway across the world in near-mint condition.
Are Mail Order Brides Real?
Shows like 90 Day Bride and occasional click-bait headlines ruined the mail order brides’ reputation, convincing many that women seeking international marriage are either fakes, scammers, or bots. But that’s not the case. Smartphones and the internet have made our world a much smaller place, letting people from different countries learn more about foreign cultures and traditions expanding their dating options at the same time. The resurgence of mail order bride popularity is merely a logical consequence of these global changes.
Do Mail Order Brides Still Exist?
Yes, they do exist, even if many do not call themselves mail order brides anymore. Instead, they are just single women looking for foreign husbands online. Although plenty of niche dating sites still advertise their mail-order bride catalogs, most cannot guarantee a successful marriage. Instead, reputable platforms promote serious international relationships, potentially leading to marriage.
Are Mail Order Brides Legal?
“Buying” a mail order bride is illegal. International marriage with a consenting foreign woman is more complex.
Most Western countries, including the US, Canada, Australia, and the EU states, recognize international marriage, regardless of how you meet your bride. As long as you aren’t blood relatives, you’re both over the age of majority, single, and capable of consenting to marriage, you can be husband and wife.
Most Muslim countries prevent local women from marrying men of other religions. So, for example, if you want to marry a girl from Afghanistan, you’ll have to get her out of the country first, but her family and government will never recognize your marriage. Other countries, like the UAE, require local women to obtain court permission before marriage. The government also used to fine citizens marrying foreigners, though the practice seems to have dissipated.
Finally, a few countries, like the Philippines, have laws prohibiting mail-order-bride-related businesses, such as marriage agencies. However, they allow international dating and marriage.
How Does a Mail Order Bride Work?
In the days of yore, you’d look through newspaper classifieds to find eligible partners. These days, all you need is a smartphone and good Wi-Fi.
Here’s how mail order brides work:
- Men and women from different countries create online dating profiles on niche platforms.
- You share your photos, personality details, and relationship expectations.
- Search filters and matching tools let you explore potential matches and gauge compatibility.
- Live chat, mail, video calls, and voice messages help build rapport and start relationships.
- You arrange to visit a potential mail order bride once you’re sure she’s a good match.
- After a couple of successful visits, you can propose and help your bride relocate.
- Once the bride joins you in your country, you must get married within the specified timeframe (in the US, it’s 90 days of arrival).
Overall, mail order dating isn’t that different from any other, especially if you’re used to online dating sites and apps. The only major difference is that you cannot meet in person right after getting to know each other because it would require international travel. So, you can think of mail order dating as an extreme form of a long-distance relationship.
What’s Different about Best Mail Order Bride Sites?
We’ll get to different ways to find mail order brides online and offline in a minute, but first, let’s talk about what makes mail order sites, apps, and agencies different from any platform you’ve used before, be it Tinder, Badoo, or Pure. All of them welcome members from across the world, all let members create dating profiles, chat, swap photos, and video chat. Yet, they couldn’t be more different.
- The first key distinction is the audience. Mail order bride sites attract singles interested in long-term relationships and subsequent marriages. They don’t go for hookups or flings because there are plenty of apps better suited for those purposes. As a result, mail order bride sites are typically smaller, with thousands of members instead of millions. But surprisingly, the response rate is much higher because everyone is on the same page.
- English-first profiles and communication are the second core difference. While mainstream dating site users focus on local matches and fill out their profiles in their native languages, mail order bride sites are primed for English speakers. So when you contact a potential match for the first time, she’ll expect you to speak English and respond in kind. This cuts down the search for matches significantly and makes conversations flow smoothly.
These differences may seem subtle, but they make mail order bride sites much more suitable for serious long-distance dating and settling down. You have to give them a try, and you’ll never want to go back to mainstream online dating apps.
How Much Is a Mail Order Bride? Mail Order Bride Cost Breakdown
You cannot buy a wife. The mail order bride cost is merely an average dating spending from the moment you meet your future wife to getting a marriage license.
No one can predict how big of a dent international dating will put in your savings account, so I won’t even try. Instead, I’ll provide rough estimates for three major categories you can’t get out of:
- Online dating charges — from $100/month. Mail order platforms offer monthly subscriptions and credit bundles. The former are predictable but can be pretty expensive. The latter provide complete control over your expenses, but new members burn through their credits quickly, wasting them on video messages from random ladies. If you’re careful, you can stretch $100 worth of credits for a month, but $200 is a more realistic goal. If it takes you six months to find your future wife, your overall dating site spending should stay within $1,200.
- International travel costs — from $1,000/week. It’s the most unpredictable and expensive spending category. It depends on your dating destination, season, stay duration, and other factors. For example, traveling to Mexico is infinitely cheaper than flying to China or Poland. You can check current airline rates using services like Skyscanner and estimate other expenses on Budgetyourtrip.
- Immigration paperwork fees — around $2,900. The immediate cost is only around $1,200, which includes filing the petition for an alien fiance and the nonimmigrant visa application charges, along with medical exams and vaccinations. After the wedding, your wife can apply for an adjustment of status and employment authorization, paying filing fees of around $1,700. You can learn more about the paperwork and filing fees at the USCIS website.
I did not include the wedding cost in this estimate because it would skew the number too much. After all, the 2024 average wedding spending in the US was $33,000+, which is way more than any other expense category. Besides, it’s not really fair to add it to the cost of a mail order bride, considering you’d spend the same amount even if you were to marry a local woman.
Can You Get a Mail Order Bride Cheap?
Realistically, mail order bride dating can’t be cheap because of the distance involved. But, comparing the cost from the first meeting to the wedding with the average lifelong dating expenses for Americans ($120,000), spending $5,000 to $10,000 might not seem like much.
Still, you can cut down your spending with a few simple tricks:
- Keep track of your dating site subscription or credit balance. Stick to the most cost-effective features to avoid overspending.
- Schedule your visits to avoid the high tourist season. You can also use a VPN to find the best plane ticket deals.
- Tackle the immigration process on your own. There’s much info across government websites and forums, so in most cases, you can skip the immigration attorney fees.
- Get a marriage license but delay the wedding ceremony. You can get married in a courthouse for under $200 instead of shelling out extra charges for everything because you’re on a 90-day deadline.
Managing expenses in the current economy is crucial, but do not let penny-pinching ruin the enjoyment you derive from your relationship.
How to Get a Mail Order Bride
Suppose you’re serious about getting married to a foreign woman. Where do you start? What do you need to know? How to avoid getting scammed? It can be pretty confusing and discouraging at first. So it’s a good thing there are at least three reliable ways to minimize risks and guarantee a comfortable mail order bride dating experience.
Best Mail Order Bride Sites
As we’ve established, mail order bride sites differ from mainstream dating apps. Luckily, the steps to finding a partner are pretty similar:
- Choose your dating destination and a mail order bride site. Some platforms are global, while others focus on a specific country or region. They also have different features and dating pools. Since most offer free signup and basic membership, I recommend you test at least a couple of platforms to choose the best one.
- Create a dating profile. It’s not enough to explore member profiles; you’ll need your own to attract potential matches. Start by taking good pictures, selfies, candid, and staged shots highlighting your looks, interests, and hobbies. Next, fill out the standard fields and write a short bio to introduce yourself and explain what you want in a relationship.
- Explore potential matches. Most mail order bride sites have flexible search filters and a swiping feature. As you scroll through profiles, start adding your favorites to a list to generate mutual interest.
- Start your first conversation. You’ll likely get plenty of messages from mail order brides, but don’t feel obliged to respond to each of them. Instead, focus on women you like and with whom you have much in common. Experiment with dating site tools to find which fits your schedule and lifestyle best.
- Build a long-distance relationship. Once you find a compatible match, use every tool at your disposal to develop strong bonds until you can meet in person.
After you shift away from the mail order bride site and explore your compatibility in the real world, the rest is a simple matter of formalizing your relationship and helping your bride relocate.
Mail Order Bride Agency
Mail order bride agencies take over the first couple of steps of the international dating process. For example, you don’t need to sign up for a dating site or create a profile. The agency managers will take care of both for you. They will also learn about your preferences and provide curated recommendations for you to choose from. An agency can also facilitate your initial conversations with an in-house interpreter and foreign culture expert.
Overall, using an agency helps smooth the way and reduce the risks of running into fakes and scammers. But it’s also more expensive than signing up for a mail order bride dating site. Besides, you won’t have as much control over your dating experience and potential match choices. And no agency can guarantee a successful match and marriage.
Mail Order Bride Tours
The most expensive of the three, mail order bride tours let you meet potential matches face-to-face and explore your chemistry instead of sticking to chat and emails. Typically, you’d have to hire an agency to organize a mail order bride tour. They will take care of booking tickets and a hotel room, arrange transportation, and provide a local guide for you. But you can also do it on your own if you meet a few likely matches online before taking a vacation to meet them. This way, you’d save on mail order bride agency’s fees, but you would also have to take over the travel logistics.
How to Become a Mail Order Bride
Thanks to niche international dating sites, women can become mail order brides in under five minutes. All they have to do is set up dating profiles. But to draw attention to find good matches, they also need:
- High-quality professional photos
- Sufficient command of the English language to fill out profile details and bio
- Enough time to look for potential matches and reach out to them
- A few hours spent online every day to respond in chats quickly
- Persistence to keep a long-distance relationship going
- Willingness to meet compatible matches in person
Ultimately, a long-distance international relationship is a challenge, but if you and your bride overcome it, your marriage will be all the stronger for it.
Essential Mail Order Bride Statistics
You don’t have to take me at my word when I say mail order brides are real and popular as ever in the US. Check out these hard facts and figures that prove international relationships and marriage are becoming mainstream:
- Over 90% of Americans support intermarriage, and one in six American families has one spouse of another race or ethnicity.
- The global number of mail order brides is unclear, with estimates ranging from 100,000 worldwide to 200,000 Russian mail order brides alone.
- In 2023, the US government issued almost 20,000 K-1 fiance visas to foreign women, and Filipinas were the most popular, with over 2,270 visas. In a year, foreign spouses brought along over 3,000 children.
- Mail order brides come from all across the world and are aged between 18 and 50+. Younger girls are mostly single, while older ladies might be divorced and have children.
- There’s no hard data on the divorce rates of international marriages, though one study suggests it’s lower than the US average of 48%, between 35.8% and 41.3%.
Unfortunately, there’s no research to prove you’ll find your future wife within a month and get married in six. Still, these numbers are promising enough to encourage you not to give up after the first disappointment.
Final Thoughts
Mail order brides helped build the US into the country it is today, and they are still real and ever popular. Even if international dating has challenges, including an extra burden for your wallet, it’s worth the effort if you’re serious about building a thriving multi-ethnic household and starting a family. Besides, it doesn’t take much to join the mail order dating game—all you need is a dating site profile.
