FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Arizona Monthly
November 2004
By Carlos Miller
Brian Mortensen may as well have died and gone to heaven.
The 47-year-old Mesa man was standing in a room filled with more than 200 slender, exotic wome, most of them in their their 20s and 30s, all of them hoping to meet the men of their dream.
Packs of single blondes, brunettes and redheads from the former Soviet nion sat at tables waiting for Mortensen to introduce himself. All of them wor color-coded tags that indicated their English skills: green for good English, yellow for not-so-good English, and red for hardly any at all.
A few women walked up and asked him to dance. Others sat waiting, hoping he would make the first move. Some with red and yellow stickers began peeling away their color-coded language tags without ever taking their eyes off him.
Mortensen was among 25 America men who had traveled to St. Peterburg, Russia on a “romance tour” hosted by the Phoenix-based company, A Foreign Affair, an internatinal matchmaking service that specializes in introducing American men to foreign women.
“The were all making eye contact, giving me an inviting look,” says the twice-divorded mortgage broker who has been happily single for five years. “It was a little intimidating, a little overwhelming.”
After all, it was the first time in his life where available women outnumbered men at a ratio of almost 10 to 1. If only Vegas had such odds.
“In Arizona, if you’re a man between 40 and 50 and you like women between 30 and 40, the pickings are not so good,” he says. “The supply-and-demand ration is out of whack.”
But not this time.
“You’re like a kid in a candy store,” says Norm, 55, a retired school teacher from Scottsdale who asked that his last name not be used.
“You’re one of 25 to 30 men in a room filled with 250-plus women, and they’re all looking at you – and they come up to you. There are too many oif them to get to know each and every one of them.”
The women sat three to four to a table with only one available seat open for a man. The men began working the room, each of them grabbing an empty seat at a table,where they spent a few minutes chatting with the women. Then, like an extreme version of speed dating, they stoodup and walked to another table while another man took their place.
During the 12-day tour, they attended another two “socials” where they repeated the process. Eventually, Mortensen and Norm met the women they would wind up marrying.
Mortensen married Oxana, a 31-year-old Russian woman with a degree in child psychology. She says she couldn’t be happier.
“Meeting Brian was very good for me,” says Oxana, who with only one year of English under her belt, speaks slowly and deliberately in a Russian accent.
“I am very happy.”
For John Adams, president of A Foreign Affair, it was yet another successful tour.
“I don’t have any way of keeping up with how many marriages we created,” says the 42-year-old Phoenix resident. “But I’m constantly receving wedding pictures and birth announcements.”
He’s even had a few repeat customers.
Norm, the 55-year-old retired school teacher, first embarked on a tour to St. Petersburg five years ago after his first marriage to an American woman ended in divorce. There, he met a woman half his age.
“I was 50, she was 25, and we were aware of the age difference,” he says.
But when he asked if it bothered her, she responded with a joke.
“She told me that ‘Here in Russia, we don’t live as long as you over there, so you will probably outlive me,” he says. “We chuckled about it.”
But after a year of beign married and living in the United States, he realized the marriage wasn’t going to work because she did not want to have children. The woman returned to Russia after the divorce, and Norm booked a second romance tour, where he met Oksana, a 29-year-old Russian woman. They got married last summer and are planning to start a family.
“This one is the real thing,” says the thrice-married man.
But now everybody is as thrilled with Adams’ business, which he says is the largest of its kind in the world and was featured in a Hollywood movie earlier this year.
Some politicians say A Foreign Affair and other businesses like it are walking a thin line between slave trading and matchmaking. They refer to them as “mail-order bride” businesses, a term that makes Adams bristle.
“Mail-order bride is a term that comes from the 19thy century when the Chinese men working the railroads would order wives from back home,” he says. “We are an international introduction service.”
Regardless, the politicians accuse these businesses of arranging marriages that leave the women vulnerable to expolitation and abuse at the hands of their dominant and chaunvinistic husbands.
In fact, at lteast two foreigh women have been killed by American husbands they me through services, which is why lawmakers are trying to pass legislation that would regulate these businesses.
Then there are those who say these businesses set the stage for lonely American men to be manipulated by foreign women seeking U.S.citizenship. These critics argue that the men are playing a game of Russian roulette when they travel to St. Petersburg and find themselves surrouned by hundreds of slim, exotic women seeking marriage-minded men twice their age.
But you’d be hard-pressed to hear these men complaining.
“It’s a very good fit because a lot of women in those countries want men who are older than them,” says Adams, “and most of my clients are in their 40s and 50s and are looking to start families.”
He says his clients are financially secure men who have grown weary of the singles scene in the United States. Most tell him they have grown disillusioned with what they call the “feminism movement” in this country and are simply seeking a woman who will respect and appreciate them. Adams says they are not, as some groups claim, seeking a submissive wife to dominate.
“Many men in this country are confused about the gender roles,” he says from his office in North-Central Phoenix. “They’re not sure whether to hold a door open for a woman. They’re not sure whether to compliment them.”
By contrast, he says, the foreign women enrolled in A Foreign Afffair are independent and educated, yet traditional when it comes to maintaining the house and family.
The company’s promotional literature goes even further. IT says that because of rampant alcoholism among Russian men, which leads to domestic abuse and a low life-expectancy rates, these women are turning to Amrican men for security.
“They’re taking control of their relationships by coming over here,” Adams says. “They like American men because we treat them better. Here, I think the women have gotten too spoiled.”
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, capitalism has not exactly run smoothly in Russia. Many women nobtaied educations only to get jobs that barely paid the bills.
Mortensen’s wife, Oxana, ran a clothing store after she divorced her child’s father, but was forced to close it after her landlord tripled the rent.
“Business was good for the first year, but it became difficult,” she says.
Oxana, who word a red label when Mortensen met her, is currently taking English lessons at a community college. She would lie to one day work with children in Arizona, a goal her husband encourages.
“She’ll only get bored if she says home,” he says. “She’s too smart, too educated.”
Though there have been cases of American men abusing foreign-born wives they me through international introduction services, there is no evidence for a higher rate of domestic violence or abuse within these marraiges than in tradional ones, found a three-year U.S. Department of Justice case study.
“The two leading indicators of domestic violence are lower income levelsand lower educatin levels,” Adams says. “The lower the income or educaton level, the higher the domestic violence rate.”
And Adams’ clients hardly fall into the low-income brackets: they’re able to afford $3,300 for a 12-day trip to St. Petersburg, not to mention hundreds or even thousands of dollars for return visits, airline flight to bring their sweetheart to the United States and fiancee visas shuld they happen to make a love connection.
For men who prefer Latinas, a 10-day trip to Cartagena, Colmbia costs $2,695 plus the additional expenses to bring their senoritas to the United States. Most clients prefer the Slavic look, though, and splurge for the Russian tour.
“The average age of my clients is 45, and are college-educated. We’re talking lawyers, doctors, and bankers,” he says. “These guys don’t any problems getting dates in this country.”
Despite their social status, Adams acknowledges that most of his clients have had problems landing dates with younger women.
“Here, you have the age stigma,” he says, “and most women in their age group don’t want to start families.”
Adams’ clients usually start off by checking out the women on A Foreign Affair website or in the catalogue, which is updated four times a year and comes complete with an order form and pictures of more than a hundred women from the former Soviet Union, as well as a few from Latin America, posed in provocative glamour shots. Most are in their 20s. A few are in their late teens. A handful are in their 30s.
The men are encouraged to contact women they like before taking the tour, which will make it easier when they walk into their first “social” and find themselves overwhelmed by more than 200 potentially interested partners.
To contact one of these women, all a client has to do is pay for her mailbox addresses, a fee that ranges from $12 for one address to pay $249 for every address in that issue.
For their photos, some women dress in bikinis, hot pants and mini-skirts. Others prefer a conservative look. Almost all gaze into the camera with bedroom eyes.
And that is what enticed Mortensen, who learned of A Foreign Affair through a friend.
“He went on a tour and had a really good time,” Mortensen says of his friend. “The tours are a gas even if you don’t meet anybody.”
Mortensen went on five dates before he met Oxana during the first week of his tour. He went out with her every night after that.
“When I met her, she just blew me away,” he says.
Oxana was one of the 15 women he had contacted before leaving the United States, a three-month period during which he learned of a few words of Russian through an audio crash course.
Oxana says the only reason she gave her profile to A Foreign Affair in the first place was because a friend insisted they do it together.
“She wanted to meet the man of her dreams,” she says.
Oxana received several e-mails from American man, but says the only man who piqued her interest was Mortensen, and he was the only reason she decided to attend the social during the summer of 2003. Despite the language barrier, both say the hit it off as soon as they met.
“We had a lot in common, and there was a physical attraction,” he says. “As a psychology student myself, I know what person I can mesh with, and I saw those traits in her.”
They went out every night during the second week of his two-week tour, sometimes using a translator for the in-depth pieces of the conversation.
“She took a year of English so we were able to communicate,” he says.
When he returned to Arizona, he was smitten, talking to her on the phone at least three times a week and running up hundreds of dollars in long distance charges. Mortensen returned to Russia in November. He met her family – who welcomed him with open arms – and returned again the following February.
At one point during the courtship, he asked her to take an 80-question personality profile test to help determine their compatibility.
“We each took the Keirsey personality profile,” he says. “It oints out where you will be compatible and where you won’t, and it showed our core values were very similar, including honesty, truthfulness, charity and family.”
The couple married last summer and are now living in hishome with her daughter, who celebrated her eight birthday in July here in the United States, and his 17-year-old son, who welcomes the new addition to the family.
“I’m a lucky man,” Mortensen says during a September school night in which he was helping his new daughter with her homework.
Norm had a different experience. His wife, Oksana, turned him down the first time he asked her out.
“After 22 minutes of meeting her, I knew I was ready, but I also knew she wasn’t sure about me,” he says. “But when she found out that I was going to be there for the whole summer, she warmed up to me and decided to get to know me.”
After spending the summer with with Oksana, Norm returned to the United States, but continued corresponding with her. He returned to Russia last Christmas and spent three weeks with her. Last June, she flew to the United States to visit him.
“I always knew she was the one,” he says. “It’s the way she smiled, the way she carried herself, the way she held my hand.”
Adams is not just the president of A Foreign Affair, he is also a client. The former real estate agent, who started the business with two buddies in 1995, has been happily married for seven years to Tanya, a 33-year-old Russian woman he met on his own romance tour. They have two children. His two business partners are also married to Russian women they met through their service.
“We have offices throughout the world,” he says. “W’re the onl company that does romance tours to Central and South America as well as Ukraine and Russia. We do it all.”
Earlier this year, the company was featured in a romantic comedy starring David Arquette, Tim Blake Nelson and Emily Mortimer. The movie, originally titled A Foreign Affair, is about two dimwitted brothers who enroll in an international introduction service to find a foreign woman to replace their late mother, who did all the cooking and cleaning for them. Love is the last thing they are looking for, but that is just where the plot twist comes in.
To keep it authentic, filmmakers accompanied Adams and several clients on a romance tour to get real footage for the movie. It was recently released in video stroes and is now called 2 Brothers and a Bride.
A Foreign Affair’s business is thriving, but that might now be the case if two Washington state politicians get their way. Reacting to the murder of two “mail-order brides” in their state over the past nine years, Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell and Democratic Congressman Rick Larsen introduced a bill last year that would require all American international-introduction businesses to conduct background checks on their clients.
A similar bill has already been passed at the state level, which prompted Hawaii to draft its own law. But the pending bill would be federal law and affects hundreds of similar businesses across the country.
Cantwell and Larsen argue that if such a law had been in place in 2000, Anastasia Soloveiva might still be alive. Solovieva, from the former Soviet Union, married Idle King Jr., whom she had met in 1998 through an international introduction service. King, whose first foreign-born wife obtained a protective order against him before divorcing him three years earlier, strangled Solovieva and was later convicted of first-degree murder.
Then there was Susana Blackwell, a Filipina woman whose husband shot and killed her, along with two of her friends, outside a Seattle courtroom in 1995 after she filed divorce papers. She was seven months pregnant.
Adams says cases like these are rare and are not isolated to these types of marriages. He also believes a federal law targeting only businesses like his would be unfair because it does not include the hundreds of online dating sites where people place personal profiles on the Internet.
Current laws require international introduction businesses to provide foreign women with information in their own language about marriage fraud, legal residency and domestic violence.
But if the new bill is passed, A Foreign Affair and other companies like it would be required to fingerprint their clients, as well as conduct criminal and marital background checks on them each time they request a woman’s contact information. The companies would have to send that information to the woman and wait for her approval before releasing her information. The process would be repeated for each mailbox number he requests, Adams says.
“It is ludicrous. If they’re going to pass a law, then the background check should be done at the time when they’re applying for a fiancée visa, not at the point where they’re tying to make initial contact.”
The law would also exclude men who meet foreign women on their own, a group that Adams says accounts for 95 percent of the fiancée visas issued in this country.
Although the U.S. Justice Department has seen a sharp rise in fiancée visas, they have not kept a record of how long these marriages last.
But one expert in the filed says the odds are stacked against them. Arizona State University sociality professor Mary Lou-Galician, known as the “Realistic Romance Guru”, looked at the company’s website and at the thousands of available foreign women. She believes the pictures might cause the men to have unrealistic expectations.
“These women all look like models on a cover of Vogue magazine,” says Lou-Galician, the author of Sex, Love and Romance in the Mass Media: Analysis and Criticism of Unrealistic Portrayals and Their Influence, a book used in university classrooms across the nation. “They’re all posed in glamour shots. It would be nice if we saw anything about their qualities, about what kind of work they do, about what kind of person they’re looking for.”
Lou-Galician believes this type of business might attract men looking for “sex object” wives as well as foreign women looking to use American men for money or citizenship. And even those couples who say they marry out of true love still have to deal with age, language and cultural barriers, she says. But she doesn’t rule out the possibility that true love can be found through A Foreign Affair.
“There is nothing wrong with how you meet people, and this might be a good way,” she says. “But all relationships require an investment of time to really get to know each other. In the beginning, there is always that exciting rush were everybody is on their good behavior.”
For Adams, whose marriage to a Russian woman has just entered the seven-year itch, it is a never-ending process of discovery that keeps their relationship fresh.
“We’re constantly learning about each other’s cultures,” he says.