Men who married mail-order brides have answered all of our questions.

It’s a classic love story. Man is lonely. Man finds website on Internet. Man selects woman from catalogue. $15,000 and a few months later, man has wife.

Okay, maybe not a classic. But it happens. And thanks to a Reddit post, we have some great stories to share with you.

An anonymous man asked the forum, “Redditors who married ‘mail-order’ brides from Russia or the Phillippines, what surprised you the most when you started living with your spouse?”. The post attracted more than 10,000 comments, ranging from heartwarming to disturbing.

What did we learn from those who have ordered themselves a bride from the Internet?

It will usually cost between $1,000 to $15,000 (although some claimed they spent upwards of $50,000). According to one user, this price includes expenses like phone calls (up to $6 per minute, depending on the site), expenses from the website, purchasing the woman’s email address so that correspondence may continue, and any visas/flights that may incur.

Sometimes a ‘romance tour’ may take place, where the husband will fly to the bride’s country and meet her family, before taking her back to his home. That’s nice.

Now here are some of the more interesting stories:

Gotta feel sad/awkward for this guy…

Reading through the comments, I realized that my mom is/was a mail order bride. I think I knew, but I never really believed it. So thanks, reddit. I just went through an entire cycle of acceptance regarding this.

Some of the lovelier stories came from men who had had trouble finding partners, often due to disabilities. These mostly had very happy endings:

I’m 35 have mild-moderate cerebral palsy, not bad enough to need a walking apparatus. Anyways when I was about 27 I started looking. It took me like a year and a half and about 22k or so to do it. I have a decent job and make about 60k a year. She has lived in the US prior and her student visa got denied she was sent back home for 4 years. So she spoke good English and was educated.

I told her that I was looking for a best friend type relationship when we started talking online and through skype. That I didn’t want her to stay with me if that wasn’t what she wanted. We’ve been together 5-6 years now. It is a couples relationship. She is very out of my league.

Most of our nights are spent sitting outside on the patio while drinking and talking. Plus I like that she is independent. I wasn’t looking for a ‘yes’ woman or someone who would act as if they liked everything I did or agreed with me on everything.

I don’t know what else to say. Maybe a lot of her customs were lost during her time here before. She does cook some odd stuff when she does cook.

Some of them were horribly depressing:

I didn’t marry a mail order bride but I use to work a job that required me to go into peoples houses and one was obviously a mail ordered bride. She did not speak English and just sat in a chair staring at the wall looking very depressed.

They had a ridiculous amount of humidifiers in the home so that it could be more like where she came from. He hung a huge picture of the two on the wedding day above his bed and while he was smiling she wasn’t even looking at the camera and just looked so depressed.

Some were more than a little bit weird:

I work in the oil field and a common theme is divorce. A coworker was divorced by his wife of 20 yrs and she took half of everything. He later decided to get a mail order bride from Brazil (he was working offshore there at the time). She was smoking hot but 6 yrs later developed terminal cancer. Before she died he ordered ANOTHER bride from Thailand and she took over the regular house chores AND took care of the Brazilian.

He told me this story when I was offshore talking about my girlfriend and confirmed it with photos and by other coworkers.

Welcome to the oil field.

Some gave us a surprisingly warm fuzzy feeling:

So I worked with a woman who was a mail order bride. She talked to me about it once and said when she arrived she did the whole submissive wife thing but quickly realized that is not what her new hubs wanted.

As they got to know each other they realized that there had a lot in common. She said she fell in love with him right away because he treated her like she was his equal partner in life and the more they got to know each other the harder she fell.

On their third anniversary they had a “real” wedding with a honeymoon. They just celebrated 10 years together and they are still madly in love. They go visit her family twice a year and they help support them. I’ve met her husband quite a few times and he is definitely an awkward guy, but he seems to be as madly in love with her as she is with him.

And some were the icing on the cake:

My uncle did, when he was 65. His bride was 37.

For a start it was weird and he tells how she’d cook meals and stand behind him so she couldn’t be seen but could attend to anything he wanted. she would insist he finish before a massage and being tucked into bed. She seemed under the impression that a man was to be kept like a king and she was there for food and sex.

She would only eat for herself after he was asleep. He tells us he had to metaphorically beat the submissiveness out of her.

Now 14 years later they have three kids, she is fucking insane in that fun-insane kind of way, and more a part of the family than most of the extended family I grew up with. Cultures well and truly blended beautifully.

Interesting. What do you think?