| Welcome to the Foreign Bride 101 Weekly Blog! |
| Candid, practical advice for men in the foreign bride search! |
| Hi! Welcome to the Foreign Bride 101 blog! Here, I will share a few ideas, expand on a few questions I've been asked recently around the foreign bride search, and offer the most candid, relevant advice and information I have for nice guys like you! Enjoy your read - and check back weekly for more! |
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| Read Previous 2009 - 10 Bog Entries Below! Here are a few blog postings from last year you may enjoy! I'll keep archiving 2010 articles here as well! |
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| Question: “Bud, I just made a deposit on an AFA romance tour to Odessa in the fall. I am wondering – should I try to write some letters to ladies from that region before I go – or just plan to meet the women who attend that tour’s social functions without any prior correspondence?” From time to time I will advise gentlemen in the foreign bride search about the pros and cons of correspondence with international women. The pros to exchanging regular correspondence with a foreign girl are many. Letters allow you to learn each other’s cultures, habits, basic likes and dislikes and reasons for being in the foreign bride search to begin with. Common misperceptions guys and gals have of one another can be easily brought down and replaced by mutual understanding and respect – and possible a mutual case of serious “like!” When a man boards a plane to travel half the world and meet a lady- or ladies - he is already intimately familiar with, the eventual face-to-face can be like something right out of a romance novel. After all, you already know a lot about each other. The only mystery at that point may be how strong your personal attraction to each other is. Chemistry is an essential ingredient to courtship, even in the foreign bride search, my friend, and it’s the one thing that cannot be measure in correspondence. This is also where correspondence can be a failure. You could literally write volumes to a foreign girl and believe yourselves to be perfect for each other only to learn after one hour together in person that – for whatever reason – you’re really not right for each other. I have seen both scenarios play out: lovers who wrote for months, finally met and were inseparably happy from that point forward AND people who wrote for months, finally met and realized right away something was just not right. If you’re a guy who has invested a few thousand dollars in a trip to Ukraine to meet one single girl who didn’t pan out, you know what an unsettling, frustrating experience that can be. A certain number of guys have written to a host of foreign ladies they planned to meet while on an upcoming tour – only to be completely smitten by a girl they met at a social event whom they had never written to at all. And then of course there are the scams. Men in their 50’s have long dismissed my well intended advice to broaden their search over as broad an age demographic as possible and bragged about their near 100% response rate from 30 – 40 under 25 scantily clad James Bond girl wannabes. Trust me here, boys, if you’re getting a nearly perfect correspondence response rate from 30 – 40 Victoria’s Secret candidates – you’ re getting scammed! This thing is good – but it’s not Fantasy Island. At least it’s not supposed to be. But…. I digressed. Remember my one resolution for this year after the way last year ended when a few of my readers took major exception to my suggesting they were getting scammed: I am not going to preach about you guys getting scammed ever again. I’ll give the same old advice I’ve always given and those who are wise will listen to it. If you’re bound and determined to get scammed you may now do so with my complete blessing. It’s your money after all. Here, however, is one element of the foreign bride thing that will affect anyone making an honest, consistent attempt at letter writing: IMBRA. Some of you are acquainted with IMBRA, the International Marriage Brokers Regulation Act of 2006, and it’s restrictions on the introduction process. For those who are new, a brief recap: IMBRA requires that agencies like A Foreign Affair must gather certain personal information from each client regarding their marital history, work history, police records, etc. All IMA’s like AFA will then submit that info to each girl a client corresponds with and – now here comes the tricky part – must then document a girl’s approval to receive that specific client’s correspondence. Failure to comply with the law is a very serious offense and most agencies take a no exceptions approach to the client – respondent approval process. So, what does I look like then, to get a girl’s specific approval to receive communication from a specific male client? Typically an agency will contact the intended recipient and ask her to come to the office and receive a client’s profile summary and his correspondence. They will ask the girl to sign approval. Then fax that to the originating agency for their records. From that point forward the two pay exchange any info they want. I would imagine that sometimes a girl is easily reached and the signature is easy to obtain. There would have to be times, however, when a girl’s schedule or proximity to the agency she signed up with would impact her availability to respond quickly. Bottom line is definitely that no signature from the lady means no letter gets through to her on your behalf. Remember – don’t blame AFA and other agencies for these ineffectual but required steps. You can thank our members of Congress for that one. So… what’s the point here? The point is that writing can be very useful in helping you find HER, in getting you better acquainted with a foreign lady’s culture, life circumstances and true intentions. It can help you get a leg up on the whole romance tour introduction process for sure. I personally recommend guys write their socks off in the beginning to women who live in the city they are going to be touring to. Why not? The worst thing that could happen is you will have several very qualified ladies waiting for you when you arrive and all they have to do to meet you is get on a bus or metro and come downtown. Couldn’t be easier, right? But be aware that IMBRA requirements will naturally slow the process down at first as agencies gather, distribute and confirm your personal information. That’s all the more reason to write A LOT of ladies. Some will just be more able than others to give their quick approval to help you get momentum. It may also be a good argument for utilizing services like AFA’s Express Mail option, where delivery of your email is personally handled and guaranteed within a reasonably short time. Of course, another option would be to just forget about correspondence altogether and get your hesitant butt on a plane headed for Ukraine as soon as possible to, as my good friend Tom Wakefield would say, the most “target-rich environment on earth,” and just “ let the magic happen!” |