Mediated marriage: internet matchmaking in provincial Russia

Abstract

were corresponding with American, Western European and Australian men who had obtained their addresses through internet matchmaking agencies. Sometimes they asked me to translate difficult passages, such as one in which an American man wrote that he had walked by ‘Victoria’s Secret’ in the ‘mall’ and wanted to know his friend’s ‘measurements’ in order to buy her a present there. Another acquaintance, the 20-year-old son of one of my colleagues, showed me photographs taken on a summer trip to the US, which included several pictures of suburban couples in their kitchens or in front of their cars. After working at a summer camp, he had been able to travel around the Midwest by visiting several female relatives and friends of his family who had married Americans, and was obviously very favourably impressed with the conditions in which he found them living. I seldom heard people in Yoshkar-Ola discuss the issues that I, having lived and studied in Frankfurt-on-Main, associated with the mail-order bride business: women abused and forced into prostitution, locked into brothels or prevented by immigration laws from getting a divorce. In Yoshkar-Ola internet matchmaking agencies were a ubiquitous presence, 2 and many women considered the possibility of looking for a husband abroad as one potential way of coping with post-socialist life. During the year I worked at Mari State University three students in the foreign language department married men from the US or Mexico, with the expressed approval of older faculty members. The agencies also provided a welcome source of income to people with foreign-language skills. Several of my students and colleagues worked for them