To dislike men who seek out foreign brides

[Hartley99]

There are quite a few documentaries about this on YouTube. The guy is usually ugly or boring or nerdy (usually all three). He claims to be ‘looking for love,’ when in reality, of course, he’s looking for a sexual partner. So he goes online and searches for girls in poor countries - often Thailand or Russia. In almost every case the girl is younger and/or much more attractive than him.

Recently, there was a documentary on channel 4, and I ended up having an argument with someone at work about it. They thought the whole thing was ‘sweet’ and funny and couldn’t see anything wrong. To them it made sense. The guy got to have sex with a girl out of his league, and the girl got to move to a richer country with more opportunities. To me it just seemed revolting. However you spin it, they are taking advantage of her poverty. They know that she wouldn’t look twice at them in any other circumstance. Apparently, after the invasion of Ukraine there was a massive spike in men looking for Ukrainian brides online. I mean that says it all. Or am I being uptight and judgemental?

@LessonsinChemistryandLove Personally, I don’t any men who travelled abroad and married but I know 4 women who have

What were the circumstances?

So do lots of people who are happy.

There's obviously a percentage of these relationships that are, at one level or another, exploitative. But there's a percentage that aren't, and I don't see how it's possible to say with any authority what the percentages are.

But I don't think that 'he's not even attractive' is a very good way of identifying a problem with a relationship. If it's right to abhor women being judged by their looks rather than their personalities, abilities, skills, humanity, how can we then say 'that ugly man is out of his league with that lovely woman. It must be abusive'?

Well, actually, I know how we can. Deep down, we think that good-looking women deserve better than ugly men. Don't we?

Your post is trying to give the impression that equal numbers of men and women travel abroad to seek out much younger, poorer, apparently more docile partners.

But we all know that's not the case. The vast majority of such people are men in search of women. And even in the much rarer cases when women marry much younger men from poor countries, the poor equation is not the same as when it's the reverse.

2 quite wealthy white woman who wanted men they felt would need them, I guess. The other 2 just had no luck in the UK so went abroad. All African / Caribbean countries. None of the woman are conventionally attractive you could say but nice enough people as far as I know.

I guess you could argue that the men are being exploited but I think relationships generally are transactional, some are just more up front about it than others.

No I’m not, I’m just giving my anecdotal view on it. Men doing this more than women is hardly surprising if you consider the different dating experiences of men and women, especially those who are not conventionally considered ‘a catch’. I actually don’t know how much rarer it is but in this day and age, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s more common than we think.