Successful marriages: | ~80% |
Average mail order bride cost: | $5,300 – $37,200 |
Average mail order bride age: | 27 y.o. |
🔥Best foreign wife website: | SofiaDate |
👍Best regional mail order bride sites: | SakuraDate, LatiDate |
Divorce rate: | ~20% |
Mail order bride industry is one of the most controversial industries ever, and for us, it makes it even more interesting for analysis and research. It’s been six years since we started to learn all about its essentials, details, and pitfalls—we interviewed a lot of real mail order brides and their husbands, found and analyzed lots of figures and statistics, and tested plenty of websites to write this in-depth guide on the modern mail order bride service and modern mail order wives.
Best Mail Order Bride and International Dating Websites
Most men meet mail order brides online, on niche dating websites, with foreign women intentionally looking for a foreign partner. We’ve analyzed the market and chosen the best mail order bride websites that can connect you with foreign singles seeking serious relationships and marriage.
Best European platform | 🎁 Get free credits |
SofiaDate | |
Best Asian platform | 🎁 Get free credits |
SakuraDate | |
Best Latin platform | 🎁 Get free credits |
LatiDate |
What Is a Mail Order Bride?
A modern mail ordered bride is a woman who meets a few most important criteria at once:
- Wants to get married in the near future, not in 3-5 years
- Is interested in dating foreign men
- Doesn’t mind migrating to a husband’s country after they decide to get married
- Wants to start a family with a foreigner for different reasons but has nothing to do with sugar babies and isn’t interested in any kind of financial compensation or other benefits
Still, getting a foreign wife has both advantages and disadvantages.
- Much faster development of relationships: no need to date someone for years to start a family
- Many mail order wives are more family-minded than western women
- MOBs can be found online pretty easily for a very reasonable price
- Chance of getting scammed
- Extra expenses on K-1 visas, trips to a bride’s country
Mail Order Bride Countries & Statistics
Who is a typical mail order bride and where is she from? Our analytics identified the top countries to find a wife in each region.
Asia
Asian brides are most commonly found in these popular countries, but some men choose to search for online brides in Japan and South Korea instead.
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Latin America
Latin brides are very popular for plenty of reasons, but in particular because of fewer cultural differences and the location of countries that make trips a lot cheaper.
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Western Europe
European brides may be less common, but men marry these women because they are no less attractive and have a similar mindset.
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Eastern Europe
Slavic brides have always been among the top choices for American men, but it’s important to consider the current situation. It’s not that easy for a Russian mail order brides to migrate due to sanctions and restrictions, and many Ukrainian women have already moved to other countries (many of them see it as a temporary thing) after Russia invaded Ukraine.
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What can say more and be more honest than figures and facts? Here are also some mail order marriage statistics that can help understand a typical mail ordered bride.
- The number of K-1 visa applicants from Asia, Europe, South America, and North America in 2021, was around 21,900. Not all of them were mail order brides, but most mail order brides from these regions apply for this very visa to marry their American husbands. In 2020, the number of applicants dropped to 14,700, which, however, is explained by the COVID restrictions.[1]
- The average age for marriage for mail order brides also varies. For example, in Costa Rica it’s 25.7, in Brazil—30, in Indonesia—19, in Japan—29.3, in Ukraine—25, in Greece—29.9.[2]
- The age difference between a wife by mail and her husband in different regions is: for Latin America—1-6 years, for Eastern Europe—2-6 years, for East Asia—2-6 years, and for Southeast Asia—2-6 years. [3]
- Over 80% of marriages with mail order brides last over the years.
Husbands of Mail Order Brides and Their Stories
Mail Order Bride Cost: How Much for Mail Order Bride Services?
The mail order bride price refers to the cost of communicating with a bride online, as well as the expenses the groom will incur for traveling to meet her in person and establish an offline connection. Men can’t order a bride, but they can meet them online, on niche regional or global dating sites. Of course, regional platforms (with Asian, Latin, or European brides only) like SofiaDate or SakuraDate work better for those who know what they are looking for and want to find a wife from a particular region or country, but in general, both global and niche sites can work. They, however, are also divided into two more categories—sites where members pay for monthly premium plans and sites where members buy credits. We estimated the costs for all types and subtypes of platforms, and here’s how many one can expect to spend on online dating/mail order bride service per month.
Prices: |
$10-50/mo. |
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Prices: |
$0,2-1,5/credit |
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Prices: |
$30-60/mo. |
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For most people using online dating sites to find a local match, it takes around two months to meet someone special and start a relationship. However, it’s important to consider that things work differently when it comes to international dating. In particular, a man who meets a mail order bride can’t just ask her out. Most men dating foreign women online spend around a year on the site before they find bride, get closer, and then decide to meet in real life. Most spend around $1,000 during that time (depending on the subscription cost and frequency of using features like expensive video chats and gift delivery).
The good news is that many dating websites and online bride services have loyalty and bonus programs. There are promo codes for Tinder, complimentary credits on websites like La-Date and BravoDate, free vouchers and discounts on platforms like UkraineBride4you and ColombiaLady, etc.
Meeting a Mail Order Bride in Real Life: How Expensive Is It?
A couple needs to meet in real life one day, and in 90% of cases, a man goes to a mail order bride’s country. The costs of such trips vary greatly. A man dating a Vietnamese woman or a lady from Ukraine is going to spend much less than a man who’s dating a woman in Argentina or Germany.
We estimated the costs of 2-week trip to the 4 most popular countries, and they are as follows:
However, trips and online dating services are not the only expenditures. A mail ordered bride will also need a K-1 visa to enter the US to get married, which usually costs a man around $1,000. Celebrating a wedding, of course, is optional, but many couples have a ceremony, and that, in turn, costs $20,000 on average. Wedding license, compared to the cost of wedding itself is super low—$20-100 depending on the state.
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How to Find a Mail-Order Bride? Details About Sites and Trips
In the modern world men can find a single woman to date or marry quickly by using special platforms and catalogs (try our mail order bride catalog here), so this is a simple question to answer. What is to be answered furtner is how to start convenient interaction with and meet modern mail order brides? Generally speaking, a single man has two options to choose from—go to a country where he has a good chance of meeting a foreign bride and join one of the mail order brides websites such as LatamJoy or UkraineBride4you. Both have their pros and cons, and we're going to talk about them in more detail.
How to Find a Mail Order Bride IRL?
In the era of globalization, open borders, and remote jobs, people have an opportunity to move someone for a year, so why not go somewhere to meet a foreign wife?
In fact, a lot of men meet foreign women on business trips or vacations, start a long-distance relationship and then marry them. Still, obviously, this doesn't work for all. There is another way to find a mail order wife in real life, though. In some countries, companies still arrange the so-called romance or marriage tours.
There are not so many places where you can order a tour—in most cases, these are Asian countries like the Philippines or Thailand. Currently, it’s impossible to find a marriage tour to Germany and even to Ukraine. Costs for one-week tours (hotel, translation, events at which men meet local singles included) start at $3,000, but we'd recommend checking the provider's offers carefully. Sometimes such tours are cheaper than if a tourist just books the hotel and buys tickets, which is pretty suspicious.
- Men who don’t like the idea of using online dating sites
- Those who planned to visit Asian/Latin/Eastern European countries
- Singles who don’t mind paying more for meeting a mail order bride IRL
- Those who don’t want to spend too much without any guarantees
- People who don’t like competition and the idea of going on a group tour
- Singles who feel uncomfortable on speed dates or other similar events
How to Find a Legitimate Mail Order Bride Online?
Generally speaking, here's how a user can distinguish the best mail order bride sites and choose one of them:
- Find a few foreign wife websites that meet a basic criterion.
Have enough female members from a particular country, all or most of whom are looking for serious relationships with foreign men.
- Do background research on all these platforms.
Find feedback and reviews and exclude all the options that obviously don't meet basic safety and quality requirements from the list.
- Join all these sites.
On good platforms, registration is free, and members can sign up pretty quickly. Test the standard features, look through profiles, google some profile photos and evaluate the quality overall to make sure people there are real.
- Learn everything about premium features & costs.
Ideally, you should test them, too, if there's a free trial or bonus credits.
- Choose the best site.
“The best” means “having the largest number of potential matches, the most detailed profiles, services, and value for money”.
- Those who are ready to settle down and start a family
- Men who are attracted to women from a particular region
- Singles who want to use modern technologies to find a wife
- Men who want to spend less and still find a wife
- Men who aren’t ready to pay for using an online dating site
- Singles who believe it’s impossible to build a healthy relationship online
Our experience shows that choosing the best mail order brides services is actually half the battle for singles looking for a foreign mail order girlfriend or a wife online. There are a lot of pitfalls, so we developed a strategy that allows us to find the best mail order bride websites and use them effectively. We share some most important rules that we always follow below.
✔️Considering multiple options is the best. When we're looking for the best platforms with international brides from a particular region, for example, Asia or Latin countries, we don't just pick the first random website that claims to help us to find a “perfect” Chinese, Brazilian, or Filipino mail order bride. First, we find at least 5 platforms that seem to have many women from this area, and learn as much as possible without joining the community. Decent mail order bride websites usually provide unregistered users with information on the company and its mission. That, along with free trials and complimentary credits, allows us to choose 1-2 best platforms from 10 websites at the first stage. Basically, a man looking for a wife should do the same thing just because considering many platforms instead choosing the first site you see on Google search results is much more effective, and most importantly, safe.
✔️Spotting hidden costs isn't such a simple task, but it's necessary not to overpay for dating. Everyone who's going to use mailorder bride services should learn everything about the costs. It seems obvious, but the thing is, these systems may be tricky. Let's analyze the pricing policies for two good platforms where one can meet a women for marriage—LatamJoy and UkraineBride4you. On the first online dating site, you'll spend around $0.2 on a credit, but 10 minutes in live chat will cost you 20 credits. On the second mail order bride website, you'll pay $3.99 for a credit, which is a lot, but 10 minutes in live chat will cost you 1 credit. That's what a future member should learn—if you don't understand how the system actually works, you're likely to spend more than you expected. By the way, platforms with hidden costs aren't worth using at all. Why join a site that tries to scam the members?
✔️Not all communication tools are effective, so testing them and choosing the best services is a part of a good dating strategy. Not all mail order brides services work the same way, but all good mail order bride sites like SofiaDate or SakuraDate provide different communication tools aimed at helping people find someone special and start a relationship online. These are streams, live chat, Mail services, gift delivery, international phone calls, etc. They have different costs and can be more or less effective for a particular user, which is why everyone should test all the services to choose the tools that not only work better for them but also spend less on online dating.
✔️Matching algorithms and search work better than reaching random mail order brides. As we've noted before, on good mail order bride sites, a user can find a perfect match much faster due to the advanced search features with many useful filters. Using them really can help a man find a future mail order wife online without spending too much time viewing random profiles and wasting a fortune on ladies who don't meet his main criteria.
A Bride’s Story: How I Became a Catalog Wife
In the modern world, men can't mail order women—that's the relic of the past and not the best one. However, it also means that once you find a wife on a mail order bride site, you'll need to win her heart online, which is not always easy without knowing ladies' actual motivations and expectations.
We decided to ask a mail order bride about them and started searching for an interviewee. We met Gloria on La-Date, and she agreed to answer our questions about her experience as a foreign bride.
Talking to Gloria
Gloria, for how long have you been registered on a mail-order dating site?
It’s been a bit more than 3 months now. I’m not a very experienced mail bride (smiles).
Why did you decide to become one of the so-called mail-order girlfriends? Wouldn’t it be easier to find a husband in Colombia?
It’s easy to find a man, you know. It’s harder to find a man who’d be actually ready to settle down. It’s harder to find a man who’s not into just casual sex. And it’s even harder to find a man who’d agree to make some effort to build a healthy relationship with your grown-up daughter and will not complain about too many working hours. I know there are a lot of guys who want to find a wife online, so yes, I decided to give it a try.
What do your family and friends think of your decision?
I’m 46, and I’m a grown-up girl. My parents just want me to be happy, and so do my daughter and my friends. Yes, I had to explain to a few of them that Americans don’t literally order a bride online and that I’m not going to list myself on some sort of catalog. When people understand that it’s just online dating and long-distance relationships at first, they always calm down and accept that.
What were the rules for a bride? Did you experience any difficulty when creating an account?
No, I didn’t experience difficulty, but the process was time-consuming. They asked me for professional photos, and I already had some. They asked me to confirm my ID, and that wasn’t the problem either. I also couldn’t join without taking a quiz, and that was even fun.
What kind of guys do you like on the site and in real life?
I like men who know what they want. I like confident guys, but this must not be an I’ll-order-a-wife-and-that-can-be-you kind of confidence. I like motivated men who come here to meet a wife and take that 100% seriously. I don’t respond to messages from men with low-effort accounts as if you can’t share some details in profiles, so why are you here? I also focus on guys who do express interest in my personality, values, and hobbies, you know, my lifestyle. After all, you can marry a pretty woman, but appearance and affection aren’t what a relationship must be based on. That just won’t last long.
How’s your experience now? Have you met someone, and didn’t you change your mind?
That’s a positive experience for now. Every woman loves attention, and I’m no exception. I get a lot of it on the site, and though some men aren’t that nice, most are polite and kind, and I just love the guys who express genuine interest in you and aren’t afraid, to be honest, about what their life is actually like. I’m now chatting regularly with two men, and that’s not the situation where I’m doing something wrong—we’re just getting to know each other better, but now it seems that both are interesting people and have similar views of family and life at large. Will see, but I feel like I’ll definitely change my marital status in a year or something. Now I see it’s possible.
No matter if you're going to find a bride in USA, find a Latina girlfriend, or marry one of the Eastern European women looking for love online, you should know what the bride's actual motivation and priorities are. We hope Gloria's story was helpful—of course, it doesn't mean that all women looking for a husband think the same, but it's good information to build on.
The Most Asked Questions About Internet Brides
Are Mail Order Brides Real?
Can you really order a bride? No, it's impossible, at least if we're talking about legal and morally acceptable options. As it goes from the information that we shared previously, modern legitimate mail order brides one can meet online have only one thing in common with the mail order wives of the past, and that's the desire to marry a foreigner and readiness to start a family in the near future, not in years and years of dating.
- So, a man can't buy a bride online but can find a bride online. Another important question that bothers many is how exactly the motivation of foreign women can be explained. The most common reasons why foreign women are intentionally looking for husbands on niche websites are as follows:
- Social problems from poverty to high alcohol abuse rates and the negative impact of machismo culture
- Personal problems, most often divorces, and negative previous relationship experience
- Inability to find a wife (women in many top countries where men are usually looking for foreign wives are often more educated and also open-minded)
- Disappointment in local men explained by multiple reasons, for example, the inability to find a man who'd be ready to marry a woman who already has children from a previous marriage
Sometimes, it's just one reason or combination of a few or even all the above-listed factors, but it's what makes real mail order wives choose this path.
Do Mail Order Marriages Still Exist?
Now, let's proceed to the meaning of mail order marriage. Just like the term "mail order wife," it has been through multiple changes and transformations. If we go back in history, we'll see that the first "tobacco wives," women who married American settlers, really married strangers for money. There was even a fixed sum announced by a man, so a foreign bride always knew what exactly to expect from her new marriage.
Time passed, and things changed, yet not so dramatically and quickly. The correspondence was delivered much faster, but the fact was men still kept married almost complete strangers. Here's how it worked—a man chose a bride from a catalog, exchanged letters with her through a marriage agency (usually, not too many of them), and then got married to a woman he barely knew. Of course, things often didn't work for newlyweds, and an agency just looked for a new bride for a man if he wanted to keep trying.
Today, things are completely different. A couple can't even get married without proving that their relationship is authentic, partners can communicate in real time a lot, even at a distance, and brides and grooms meet in real life at least a few times before they decide to get married. In other words, mail order bride marriages exist, and men really can find a wife online, but aside from the quicker terms and stronger motivation to start a family, basically, these are just marriages between foreign nationals.
Do mail order marriages work?
Finding a wife online has never been easier, but do such marriages work? In fact, they do. Moreover, they end in divorce even less often than marriages between people from one country and even city, and here are the things that can explain why this happens:
- Focusing on similarities rather than on differences. Many intercultural couples note that they don't notice that many differences because they focus on what they have in common. That's the only healthy way to build a happy cross-cultural relationship and enjoy a happy and long family life.
- Stronger motivation to start a family and a higher level of consciousness. Such couples get married not just because they feel affection and passion but because they are really ready to start a family. In this case, strong motivation is the key to success.
- Authentic dating before marriage. As we've noted previously, modern online dating differs a lot from the way men communicate with foreign brides of the past. Today, couples are actually dating, getting to know each other well enough, and building emotional connections, as well as plans together.
A lot has changed since the time when men married almost strangers. Today, men meeting brides online are just meeting people from other cultures with similar mindsets and goals, really building emotional connections, and often, making the right choices after they get married. All this together makes not all but many mail order marriages last.
Our Experts' Opinions
'Love Me' Documentary
If you want to learn more about mail-order brides and hear stories from real people, we recommend watching this documentary.
How OneBeautifulBride Can Help Find a Wife?
On this site, everyone who's looking for an online wife will find useful content:
- Guides to finding a mail order girlfriend in a particular country or region. It's not so easy to choose the best place to find a wife, and our guides on top mail order bride countries describing cultural peculiarities and nuances of local dating can help make the right decision.
- Detailed and unbiased website reviews. Choosing the region is half the battle, and choosing the right website is another half. On OneBeautifulBride, you will find the reviews of all top mail order bride sites that we've been using as premium members.
- Tips & insights to mail order bride dating. A man who's looking for a bride, even the one who chooses one of the top mail order brides services, can't know all the nuances of international dating. But he can find information on the most important aspects of building a relationship with a foreign mail order bride.
- Visa guides. For those who've already met someone special, we have detailed visa guides with all the costs and requirements calculated and explained.
Knowledge is power—it's exactly what can help one avoid mistakes, have at least a pleasant experience, and achieve the final goal, and you can find it here.
Mail Order Bride Scams
Last year, Americans lost over $300 million in romance scams. That happens both to those who use Tinder or local dating sites and to those who are looking for legit mail order brides on niche platforms. It's crucially important to follow safety rules when dating online, and we have some illustrative facts and tips for those who're going to find a perfect foreign bride for sale but don't want to lose all their money after meeting a scammer.
Final Thoughts
A dating site or a mail order bride website can really help one find a wife online free: an online platform is a new kind of mail order bride agency, and you should choose it carefully in order to succeed. Choosing the right place to look for a wife is no less important—doing some research before joining the regional website is actually one of the best decisions that a single man can make.
FAQ
Generally speaking, it works like regular online dating with only a few important differences. First, it’s usually a premium service. Second, niche websites connect you with singles who are looking for a foreign husband and not a local match and are ready to immigrate if they succeed.
Yes, they are real. The thing is, a man can't buy a wife online. It's just a myth, or should we rather say the relic of the past, but meeting marriage-minded foreign women who are ready to immigrate to a future husband's country is absolutely possible. That's exactly who we call foreign mail order wives now, and men can meet them on niche mail order bride websites or through regional dating services.
Yes, mail order spouses are legal. These are just singles that other singles meet online. If they have authentic romantic relationships and if they have met in real life, they will be able to get married in most countries of the world.
You can’t buy a bride in the US. Overseas brides aren’t for sale, either. They are single foreign women looking for husbands in Western countries, including the US. However, you can legally marry them only if you have an authentic relationship and if you have met in person within 2 previous years—otherwise, a bride just won’t get a visa and won’t be able to enter the US.
It largely depends on a country and on the decisions that a man who’s looking for/dating a mail order brid makes. The average cost for most countries is around $7,000 (includes the cost of online dating services, 2 trips to a bride’s county, and a K-1 visa).
Most men who marry mail order wives meet them on niche dating websites designed specifically for Western singles and women from a particular country or region, for example, single ladies from Asia, Latin America, or Eastern Europe.
In Asia, it’s the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, China, and India. In Latin America, it’s Mexico, Dominican Republic, Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela. In Eastern Europe, it’s Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. In Eastern Europe, it’s Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.
They become mail order brides for different reasons, and usually, it’s rather about the combination of different social, socio-economic, and personal reasons, like gender imbalance, high domestic violence rates, the impact of the Western culture, social pressure to get married in a certain age, etc.
There are no very specific qualities or criteria. Still, in most cases, it’s a middle-aged or older man who has an average income and is ready to settle down and start a family in the near future with a woman who also wants this.
Around 20% of mail order marriages end in divorce, and it’s even less compared to the divorce rates of some countries in the world.
If you want to find a new wife, and if you're planning to meet someone special in another country, you may consider joining a niche dating website created exclusively for those who are looking for mail order spouses. In this case, you'll need to choose the country or region where you'd like to find a girlfriend and then search for a website that can connect you with Asian brides, Ukrainian brides, Latin women, etc.
You can't mail order American brides, and you can't mail order foreign brides. Such practice is illegal in every country in the world, with no exception. However, you can choose a mail order brides site where you'll meet foreign women, will be able to communicate with them in multiple ways, build emotional connections, start dating someone, and then meet in real life.
Where can I find a wife? There's no simple answer to this question, but there are countries with the best foreign wives to marry. These are also the countries with the highest intermarriage rates, for example, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam in Asia, Ukraine in Eastern Europe, and Brazil and Mexico in the countries of South and North America.
There are no mail order brides for sale, but a man still pays for dating services and trips. Hence, the cheaper the trips, the lower the total cost. Vietnam, Ukraine, Poland, the Dominican Republic, and the Philippines are considered to be some of the "cheapest" places to find a wife.
My friends thought I was crazy when they learned I would marry a mail order bribe. They gave us anywhere from two months to a year. But it’s been five years, and we’re still going strong, waiting for a baby to join our small family. I won’t say it’s all rainbows and unicorns because no relationship is ever easy, but it’s worth it, and I can only hope I make Lan as happy as she makes me.
I’m not looking for a mail irder bride. But I travel a lot on business, and I use these sites to meet local girls to keep me company on my stays. It’s cheaper than hiring a guide, and I get all the local know-how with arm candy to boot.
If you want an Asian or Slavic mail to order bride, learn to use Google Translate. I’ve discovered that few ladies are fluent in English, so it’s best to avoid puns and jokes that don’t translate well. And adding a few words in their language here and there is a great way to break the ice.
I’m now chatting with a couple of ladies, hoping one of them will soon become my mail order beide. I didn’t think these sites were real, but your advice helped me avoid scammers and taught me to stay out of trouble.
I can’t thank you guys enough! Your reviews and tips helped me to find love, and my mail order brode will soon come to live with me. We’re getting married in a few months. Keep up the good work!
Why do I have to decide the country of a mail order brid before choosing a dating site?
You don’t. Instead of niche sites, try a global one with mail ordered brides from all across the world, like TheLuckyDate. It works for me.
Mail in order bride cost seems astronomical until you think about how much money you spend on dates. Then it doesn’t seem as expensive.
I didn’t realize mail oder brides were still so popular, but I’m glad I’m not the only one tired of high-maintenance US girls.
I don’t think two weeks is enough to get to know a mail ordered bride. But if it’s just the first meeting of many, I guess it’s ok.