So, you want to marry a foreigner? Fantastic! This can be an exciting endeavor.

Perhaps you met your chosen foreign person through chance encounters, introductions through mutual friends, while on vacation or studying overseas, or perhaps, as is happening more often these days, the local men/women aren't working out for you, and you've found someone through a pen-pal site, club, or over the internet.

Meeting a foreigner already in your country and falling in love is usually different than meeting someone who has never been to your country. In the first case, the foreign person already has some idea of what to expect, knows about the culture, perhaps the language as well, and has an idea if they will like living there permanently.

In the second case, this isn't so. Your chosen foreigner might have only have stereotypical views of your land.

It's this second case we'll discuss here a little more.

The first step in having a successful relationship with a foreigner is to figure out your motivation for wanting the relationship. With insincere motivation, chances are, things will not work out well in the future. You would have potentially wasted a lot of time and money for nothing, as well as making someone else unhappy.

Most people have the usual motivation that leads them to wanting relationships - loneliness, desire to start a family, have someone fun to be around, perhaps a more traditional person who has different values from your culture, etc.

The second step is to try to understand the point of view of your chosen foreigner. Why are they willing to leave their home country? What is their home country really like, and will they be able to adapt successfully to life in yours?

Some common misconceptions about why people want to leave their countries is that they are deeply unhappy, their country is deeply troubled, everyone just wants to move to a richer country with more freedoms, etc.

Sometimes this is true - but in most cases, this is only a very small part of their motivation for wanting to leave. There can be many factors why someone would willingly leave their own culture and people, and this depends entirely on mental attitude held by this person. Remember that foreigners are people too - they have their own culture for sure, but within the rules of their culture, there is also an entire range of people from good to bad, and in between.

Some people want to leave their countries because they don't really fit in very well with their own people. Some have very poor families, and think they can build a better life for themselves somewhere else. Some are excited by the idea of living overseas, and by the opportunities that they may have. And some are just following a trend.

Very few just happen to like your particular country, and want to move solely because you come from country A or B.

Consider that for every person willing to leave their country, there are also a lot who are happy to stay. Very few people who are well off, successful, and have a happy family life ever wish to permanently leave their countries - and yes, there are plenty of such people even in 'poor' countries like Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, etc. Just go and look for yourself. Chances are, you've never met such people, and this is precisely because they don't often visit your country.

Consider what types of Americans foreigners meet in their own countries? How many homeless Americans travel overseas? Not very many.

And so, with these points in mind, try to find out as much about their country and culture as possible. Remember that few people really know that much touristy-type information about their own lands - you don't have to learn all the rivers and town names of their country. But do try to find out their customs, and how they usually act, and perhaps a bit of history about their country which will help explain WHY they act in those particular ways.

One particularly useful thing to do is to learn the native language of the country your chosen foreigner is from. Even if you don't really succeed in being able to communicate in this language, learning the various language structures usually helps you to grasp that these people really might be thinking differently from you. Plus, the effort is usually appreciated.

 

Let's review what we have so far:

• You've established that you want to marry a foreigner, because of various reasons, and that those reasons are not dodgy.
• You understand that your foreigner is a person, just like you, and not some strange product of an alien environment, pre-packaged and programmed only to serve or please you.
• You have some idea that people have different motivations for doing things, too, and have considered the reasons your foreign person might want to come and live with you.
• And you've made some headway into learning about how they behave in daily life, what they expect, and also a bit of history, to help explain WHY they do these things. And perhaps you've tried to learn their language, so you have some practical idea of these differences.

Step 3 of successful relations with foreigners is now to practice what you've learned in the first two steps. This is the hard part, because it requires the actual effort.

 

Some other useful tips:

* Would you be willing to live in their country for a year? If you can honestly answer 'yes', then this means you aren't so adverse to their culture, and are likely to be more sensitive to cultural differences when they occur. You're more likely to listen to your partner when they have moved to your country, and understand their concerns rather than try to force them to act like everyone else in your society.

* If you have chosen a partner because you prefer their cultures' values over your own, then you shouldn't continue with all the same qualities of your culture which drove you to finding someone different in the first place. For example: if you have found the women of your culture to be too interested in their careers, and this is why you have chosen a foreign wife - then don't put your career ahead of your new wife. She will not appreciate it.

* Chose a foreigner that somewhat matches your appearance and level of education. If you are very old, unattractive, don't have much money, and chose a young, intelligent, beautiful wife, then guess what will happen? Yes, many of them will want to improve their lives by living in a better country, and many will prefer nice qualities in a man over purely how they look - but for god sake, they are people - not commodity items. Probably your young, beautiful wife will have insincere motivations if she chooses you, and she will probably leave your life somewhat worse than before you met her.

* If you have had many problems with partners in the past, you may want to seriously consider if it really is you that has some problems. Otherwise, you'll just be transferring past problems over onto another person. The cultural barrier may make your problems look different, but if you had problems before, they are not suddenly going to vanish just because you've chosen a foreigner this time. Once they've learned your language and cultural norms, they will figure you out just as easily as any previous partner did.

Consider this story - an Englishman on vacation in Israel met a young, beautiful Israeli woman. When they made love, she found it very exciting, because he would constantly talk in an excited manner. She didn't know what he was saying, she just found it exciting. No Israeli man had ever spoken during love-making before. So, they got married, and she moved to England with him. After a while, she started to learn English quite well. Then, she listened to a soccer game one day, and recognized many of the terms were the same as what her husband was saying when they were in bed. As you can imagine, the illusion of exoticness that she had about her husband vanished rather rapidly.

There was a Yahoo! newsgroup for men who had at one time had Russian/Ukrainian, etc wives, had broken up with them, and wanted to try again. The newsgroup was sort of a support group for them.

And wow, what a bunch. Almost none of them knew anything about the culture or country that their ex-wives had come from, and almost all of them were a bunch of whining, complaining old boring men! It wasn't difficult to see where the problem was, but here they were, not understanding why their lovely Svetlana's, Natasha's or Olga's had run off with some handsome young man as soon as there permanent green cards came in the mail, often cleaning out the bank account as well.

So, successful relationships with foreigners can be difficult, but they are by no means impossible. You simply have to understand a few things, and with any luck, what's been explained here will cover most of those things.

Good luck!

 

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