The world of marriage is a crazy one full of unlikely matches and tragic stories and happily ever afters. And this hold even truer for the world of mail-order bride services.
A mail-order bride is a woman who lists herself in a catalog and is selected by a man for marriage after a payment is made to her agency.
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Yes, it’s a real thing. And if you thought this is a recent phenomenon, think again. The first mail-order bride services started in the mid-1800s in the American frontier. And while it may not seem very different from an arranged-marriage service, the practice is far from dying out.
And the practice has changed with changing times. Where in the past, an agency would advertise mail-order brides in the paper, now the process is a lot more like online dating.
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What’s more, statistically, marriages with said mail-order brides have observably lower divorce rates. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services mentioned that 80 percent of reported mail-order marriages stayed together.
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It is however, a risky business too. There have been stories of horror – like when an agency’s sub par screening processes resulted in a California man abusing multiple immigrant women before murdering his second wife.
But from what we found on Reddit, it’s not all bad news.
This man and his young wife had a strange start – where she would just treat him like a king and felt she was only there for food and sex – but a pretty darn happy ending.
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This person with limited luck when it came to dating girls married a Filipino girl and found himself a soulmate.
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Some others had hilarious (probably only in hindsight) experiences of mail-order confusion straight from Philippines.
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Others did not have the most ideal experience.
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And there were some that were truly just taken advantage of.
This man, for instance, now lives in a single bedroom apartment, while his now-ex-wife is back in Thailand.
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And this man in his own house which is hardly his own anymore.
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Mail-order marriages, just like any other to be honest, comes with its own unique set of risks and joys, I suppose. And since the trend is not going anywhere anytime soon, we wish everyone who ventures into it all the luck and happiness possible.