Can You Trust Dating Sites? Part 1. Market for brides

My affectionate and gentle Internet

As many articles and studies have been written about online dating – the fingers and toes of an entire army are not enough to list them all. And all the same, the topic remains and will become even more relevant over time. 18 years ago I worked as a translator in one of the dating agencies and I know firsthand about the reality of finding a life partner on the Internet – from personal experience.


Can You Trust Dating Sites? My affectionate and gentle Internet. Part 1. Market for brides

Can You Trust Dating Sites? My affectionate and gentle Internet. Part 1. Market for brides
Photo: Depositphotos

My friend – I ll conditionally call her Scarlett O Hara, I ll write about her again – began a long and tedious divorce from her walking husband. She, having defended her dissertation, was forced to raise two children. The walking husband, of course, threw money on the hearth, but when he was once again brought into the house in the position of a log, our Scarlett could not stand it. And she demanded from her husband for the six years of unemployed life spent on the family … a wheel from his second car, Toyota.

The tire fitting itself was not needed for a friend, so she demanded its cost in monetary terms. After another scandal, she received it in wooden terms. However, this was enough for Scarlett to start promoting one business after another. Soon it became a successful tourist operator, mainly due to the opening of left, supposedly tourist, visas to Europe – there was such a period in our common life. The business blossomed pink and a friend bought a computer.

For the perplexed, I will say that at that moment she was almost fifty … That s when she decided to open a marriage agency on the basis of a travel agency. Not everyone had computers, and there was a “tenseness” with foreign languages ??in the country.

A friend was almost 50 when she decided to open a marriage agency
A friend was almost 50 when she decided to open a marriage agency
Photo: Depositphotos

Many of our women were eager to go to the West, as in the anecdote, “at least a pig, at least a scarecrow” Scarlett enthusiastically took up the marriage business, not forgetting about herself, because unofficially she already felt like a free woman. She told me that as soon as a suitable candidate – in every sense of the word – was drawn on the horizon, who would accept both her and her two children, she would immediately dissolve the marriage with the log brought in in the evenings.

By the way, her not yet ex-husband, sensing a strange and successful woman nearby, retired from the apartment of the wife s parents to his parents. She invited me as a translator. At that time we did not have our own website, it was quite expensive in the late 90s, but we found free foreign resources and posted the profiles of our women on them, and the American Singles website became our favorite.

Somehow our incoming system administrator, or simply “sysadmin”, decided to experiment and become a hacker. American Singles resisted a little, but how can they compete with our gambling programmers! A day later, our female clients got access to the profiles of 200 “their” men for personal use. Then we began to select the best of the proposed, and not they us.

But that was a long time ago, although even today I periodically help my female acquaintances to compose a questionnaire, write a romantic letter or a letter with a humorous slant, banter, even write poetry in English, translating someone s stream of consciousness into a digestible form. Men, regardless of their country of residence, like it very much.

Our Scarlett grabbed two straws. One broke after a while, and the other later became her faithful husband. But the whole point is that she has acquired a very good, caring, but … “budgetary” husband, with difficulty supporting children from his first marriage. And then there s this Ukrainian woman with her daughter.

The son was old enough and he himself decided to stay in his native land and receive two more free education, but with regard to his ten-year-old daughter, everything was not so smooth. The log, that is, the husband, acted almost like the father of the heroine of the film “Intergirl”. No, he did not demand money, but he did not give permission to export his daughter.

Scarlett wouldn’t be Scarlett if she hadn’t found a way out. She proved her ex-husband on her fingers that over time he would become the father of an American woman and would be able to come to the vaunted America, which attracted him like a donkey to a carrot. And if she doesn t, then she knows about his business that the entire city tax office will spend a year on this money.

Scarlett wouldn’t be Scarlett if she hadn’t found a way out
Scarlett wouldn’t be Scarlett if she hadn’t found a way out
Shot from the film “Gone with the Wind”

In conclusion, I will cite an excerpt from the story “My affectionate and tender Internet”, written in due time, just illustrating our matrimonial stage. I confess, I also tried on this game – I have a wonderful husband and I feel good with him.

“Having launched the“ gray ”Helen into orbit, my friend and I did not hesitate to dive into the bride market ourselves. A friend was just beginning a period of difficult relationship with her husband, and I, as they say, for the company. After bewitching the questionnaires, subtracting a couple of years, adding a few centimeters of height and portraying ourselves as such ideal, from a male point of view, ladies, we both received several dozen letters from the States and even from hot Nigeria. It was amazing! We played the game, and it started to give real results. The letter from the Nigerian German also contained a photograph of him hugging a palm tree at the edge of the pool, in which he cooled down, and then scribbled his letters by e-mail. Exotic, which did not even fit into our post-Soviet imagination, and suddenly put at our feet!

There was also a letter from a certain Harold Bobb from Washington (he was immediately christened Harold the Womanizer), by the way, in the photo he was not taken against the background of a palm tree or a pool, and not even against the background of the White House, but against the background of our beloved monument to the lost ships in the Sevastopol. Another correspondent with the completely unthinkable name Irol Uygur turned out to be a sweet-talking Latinos from Montgomery, Alabama. In the first letter, he confessed how passionately in love with us. All at once. In the photo, he looked like a normal Brazilian-Mexican soap hero, and to be honest, I didn t understand what he was looking for in American Singles with his good looks and sweet speeches. It would be understandable to be a rich American, but write to the half-impoverished Ukraine? Maybe he just didn t know where she was, and for him we were as exotic as a Nigerian palm tree and a pool for us? I don’t know, because through several letters that are almost identical in content, “I am a romantic, sensitive, devoted” … etc. the molasses ran out without any explanation. “

To be continued…

  • Comment on one

  • Estimate




Article published in Issue 11/04/2018

Updated 04.12.2018

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *