Academic Research on International Dating
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Here at A Foreign Affair, we want you to do your research on international dating because we want you to be comfortable with your decision. That will mean you will be happier, the women you meet will be happier, and, in fact, everyone on the tour will be happier.
But who can you trust? Obviously, A Foreign Affair is a business, so although we try very hard to be transparent, we know everyone is not going to trust our opinions. So, where can you turn?
The media is one good source. Dozens of serious journalists have investigated us over the years. So, take a look at what the media has reported about A Foreign Affair over the years.
That coverage will probably shock you. It is overwhelmingly positive, and for some suspicious guys, that seems suspicious.
Feminist Professors
The best way to decide if international dating is right for you is to look at the academic research into international dating. The problem is that academic research is not easy to find, and sometimes it is not even easy to identify.
Millions of guys are intrigued by the concept of international dating, but too scared to actually take the leap and try international dating. They have visited our website or the websites of one of our competitors and been blown away by the women. They are just so beautiful.
Often - maybe even usually - the first thought a man has is, "This has to be a scam." The second thought is usually, "Where can I get trustworthy information about international dating?"
There is a lot of information out there, but how much of it is trustworthy? There are all sorts of sources of information. One source that almost every man turns to before he decides to jump into international dating is crowd sourced information.
This can be useful. Message boards and social media posts provide an apparently independent point of view. Usually, the people posting seem to have information based on their own experiences, but there are some huge problems with crowd sourced information.
It is just one person's experience. Perhaps they are tall, handsome, rich, loquacious, intelligent, and kind, or maybe they're not? Their experiences are just one person's experiences and often not representative of what you might experience.
More troubling is that crowd funded information is notoriously easy to manipulate. There are literally thousands of companies from Dallas to New Delhi that get paid hundreds of millions of dollars to do just that and normally there is no way to know the truth of any statement.
Then there is sales material put out by the various dating agencies. Hey, we want you to trust us, but really we have a bias. We believe we are doing a hot damn wonderful job, but obviously we have a bias.
You need information from an unbiased source. A source without any financial ties to the dating industry with the time, energy, and resources to actually research the question.
Academic Research on International Dating
That is why academic research is so important.
This information can be helpful, but it can also be manipulated. Nearly all of the research on international dating is done by proudly feminist sociology or women's studies professors. They are the most unbiased source of information, because they are predisposed by training, education, and modern academic culture to oppose international dating.
Most of these young scholars were initially sure that international dating sites were part of a worldwide criminal conspiracy or at best an unethical option for sleazy men who couldn't get a date in their own country.
In the 1990s it was common for female professors who had never actually done any real research into international dating and how the relationships develop to be quoted in the media or testify to congressional investigators about the evils of the industry. These professors usually offered a terrifying analysis that foreign brides were the victims of human trafficking and the men who married them losers or deviants.
Donna M. Hughes, Ph.D. Professor and Carlson Endowed Chair of the Women's Studies Program at the University of Rhode Island received a grant from the United States Government to study international dating, and she had as many negative preconceptions as any of her colleagues.
And, like many old professors, she did not let new evidence change her mind. In Ukraine she was amazed that she wrote that, "Interviews with 160 young women from Southern Oblasts of Ukraine, where there was high recruitment by marriage agencies, found that two thirds of them wanted to go abroad."
International dating, which was already over a decade old in Ukraine when she did her research, and it drove her insane that it had such a good reputation that mothers sometimes urged their daughters to sign up. Because of this, Professor Hughes' 2004 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is simply bizarre, because she makes harsh charges based on groundless rumors and downplays the significance of her own research.
The Young Professors
Gradually, young professors eager to destroy the evil of international dating began to go and actually research the international dating industry. They traveled the world to interview the men and women meeting on international dating sites and looked at government records. They talked to the people that ran dating agencies and observed couples on dates.
Like Professor Hughes, they also expected to discover human trafficking, prostitution, and women being treated more like sex slaves than wives. They were shocked. Most eventually realized that the modern international dating industry was good for men and great for women. They discovered that women tended to have real agency in their marriages and usually the marriages were happy and successful.
Lisa Simon, a graduate student at the University of Denver, was one of the first of this generation of young academics who were sent out to research the international dating industry. She explained that in the beginning - like many of these young feminist scholars educated for years on buckets of the foulest theory - she believed that, ". . . the women are mainly victims of unscrupulous marriage brokers and/or husbands."
Instead, she found almost the complete opposite. The women were not just sad pawns, but actually were smart, brave individuals making a calculated choice designed to improve the quality of their lives and that of any children they had.
Eventually, she concluded that, ". . . the international matchmaking industry can be seen as a positive force in the context of shifting gender relations within and between the countries involved." Here is a link to her dissertation: Marriage, Migration, and Market International Matchmaking and International Feminism by Lisa Simon (2001)
Another young scholar, Pamela S. Haley, started her research knowing that, "Popular media, legal scholars, and some feminists have largely described the phenomenon of international dating as an oppressive system where women have little control or agency over the process." Worse, she believed that the husbands were, "...ogres who are out to exploit these women for domestic and sexual services."
Her research focused on Filipinas living in South Florida who turned her expectations upside down and inside out. She wrote that, An unanticipated and paradoxical outcropping of the interviews was the participants' descriptions of their courtship and subsequent marriages. In this one area both the brides and grooms unanimously deemphasized their own agency, and instead highlighted romantic narratives with each insisting that they had "fallen in love.
The discovery that the men and women in these relationships believe themselves to be in love drove Haley to distraction in her dissertation. She almost apologizes for her research, but it is still worth a read. The Filipina -South Floridian international Internet marriage practice: Agency, culture, and paradox
However, Haley wrote in 2008 and the best research on international dating was from a few years later. Both of the following works are easily available, one is in fact free, and both are definitely worth reading.
Best Academic Work on International Dating In General
Marcia Zug, now a law professor at the University of South Carolina, certainly started off angry and suspicious about international dating. Her research began with an article in GQ Magazine.
It was an awful story about an entitled American man who comes across as arrogant, uncaring, and almost abusive. Zug explains, "This article horrified me."
Now, she's a young, smart woman with a mission. "As I started my research, I expected to find that modern mail-order marriages are fundamentally harmful and that these problems are long-standing." You can almost see her on MSNBC right now going on about the evils of mail order marriages while Rachel Maddow stares into her eyes.
But that's not what happened. "I was surprised that this is not what I found," She writes, explaining and then goes on to explain that, "Despite significant risks, mail-order marriages are typically beneficial and even liberating for women. Consequently, after reaching this conclusion, the object of the book changed."
Here is a link to her book, Buying a Bride: An Engaging History of Mail Order Matches. It was published by New York University Press. That means not only did she have to answer questions from the editors, but she had to address concerns from outside reviewers before publication.
Most of those outside reviewers were probably sociology or women's studies professors, so this is the most critical view of mail order marriages imaginable. And, of course, their most critical comments were reserved for the last chapter which is where Zug examines the modern international dating movement, but Zug is AMAZINGLY positive!
Her conclusion is that, "Today's mail-order brides and grooms are not a throwback to an earlier, unenlightened time. Instead, like most of us, they are simply men and women who believe marriage will improve their lives, and we should support their choice."
BOOM!
Buying a Bride is incredibly strong. The last chapter is something you could photocopy and send to a worried relative who believes you are being scammed.
And of course you can dig down in the footnotes and find Zug's references. That is why Buying a Bride almost makes looking at other academic work superfluous. It is well researched, easy to read, and readily available.
Zug lays out her argument and explains her transformation from critic to a supporter of mail order marriage. That makes her work invaluable, but there is an even better academic review of A Foreign Affair.
The Best Work on A Foreign Affair Specifically
Julia Meszaros was a desperate graduate student - which if you know anything about graduate students means she was completely freaking out. She was trying to research singles vacations, but she was having a hard time getting anyone from any of the tour operators to speak to her.
Finally, she drove to one of the seminars that A Foreign Affair regularly puts on and met John Adams, the President of A Foreign Affair. She told John about what she was thinking and, "John welcomed my interest in the industry and told me that whatever tour I wanted to attend, I could. All he asked was that I come into the experience with an open mind." (Meszaros p. 38)
She took four tours with A foreign Affair and largely demolished most of the common stereotypes about international dating. For instance, many people, especially Western women, wonder why so many foreign women sign up for international dating sites, but Julia explains that, "For women in Colombia, the Philippines, and Ukraine, disgust with their local options also prompted their decisions to sign up with introduction agencies. Across all three countries, many women complained that local men were unstable, unfaithful and not serious when it came to relationships." (Meszaros p. 10)
She also discusses scams and the desires and anxiety of both the men and women. And she is focused intently on AFA. No other dating company has EVER allowed this sort of deep dive from a completely independent researcher.
This is the last thing in the world from a sales document. It is an academic dissertation - 233 pages with some seriously long paragraphs, an awful title, and a good bit of academic jargon - but if you have any doubts about our goals, procedures, and ethical compass you should read it.
And remember, this work was approved by a committee of academics with the time and energy to make Meszaros defend every sentence. It is as unbiased a source on romance tours and the operations of A Foreign Affair as it is possible to find anywhere, and it is full of footnotes to additional sources if you want to dig deeper.
It Is All About the Research
Despite these great sources, it is still not hard to find a professor condemning international dating as human trafficking and making fantastical claims about the men seeing international dating. This confuses a lot of men pondering international dating and even more journalists.
If you run into a critical academic, stop and read the criticism carefully. The main question to ask is, "Did they actually interview the men and women involved in these relationships?"
Most of the academics who harshly criticize international dating have never done any actual research. They have never interviewed the people involved or traveled to observe the dating process. Usually, critical academics are focused on defending feminist theory.
This goes double for law review articles which are pounded out by harried law students in a few weeks. They almost never offer a balanced review of academic literature, and it does not appear that there has ever been a law review article that included ANY interviews with the men and women trying to find love on international dating.
So, don't focus on the conclusions of any article. Focus on the author's sources and research. Did they conduct interviews? Did they talk to the managers of the dating companies?
Try to figure out what they are trying to prove. Many of the more critical authors claim to be concerned about the women, but then they often ignore what the women say both when they are dating foreign men and the women who later marry. The men? Usually, the men are just cartoon villains in critical articles.
We pay attention to those women and men. We try to help them find the happiness they want in life. That is our goal. Rigorous academic research proves that we do manage to help a lot of people find happiness.
Of course, that does not mean that every couple ends up being happily married forever or that there are no abusive relationships. This is the real world and sometimes things do not turn out the way we would hope they would.
But do your research and make the best choice for yourself.
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