Marriage is not easy. It requires patience and mutual trust and respect. Perhaps one of the most intriguing types of marriage are the ones that involve mail order brides. The children of mail order brides took to Reddit to share what their lives are really like. Content has been edited for clarity.
Easily Abandoned
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“My mom never actually told me the story of how my parents met, but from the little details she gave me, I’m sure she was a mail-order bride. She’s from the Philippines, where marital abuse is common and divorce is illegal, so I understand her wanting to leave. She witnessed her older sisters being physically and emotionally abused by their husbands, which drove them away from their country and family.
My parents met through a newspaper, or so I’ve been told. I’m not sure of the logistics of it since my father is Russian. I just know they met, got married, and moved to the U.S.
To make a long story short, my dad was a great father, from what I remember of the ten years I knew him. He was also great at running away from the police and escaping the country when he was being suspected of intimately assaulting one of his fifth-grade students. He abandoned his family so easily.
It’s hard having a parent abandon you, but it’s so much worse when you know that they left because they committed the worst possible crime. And there’s nothing I can do about it. There’s a woman out there, who was abused by her teacher, and there’s no possible way I can tell her how sorry I am, or how sorry I wish my dad was. He was a respected teacher at his school too, so I’m sure the investigation took a long time because no one wanted to believe her. And what’s worse is, sometimes I want to try and find him. I miss my dad. He’s a bad person, but he’s still my dad.
On the other hand, my mom knew he was guilty, and she protected him. She was weak, easily manipulated, and a coward.”
‘It Disgusts Me’
“My dad is about 40 years older than my mom. He’s even older than my grandpa. It disgusts me.
My mom wanted a better life, and all that for her side of the family and my dad’s side was rich, but he practically ran all his money down the drain by the time my mom arrived in the States. My mom did all the housework while working, my dad did nothing and still does nothing besides watch T.V. They argue and yell frequently, I don’t remember the last time my dad wasn’t a racist and extremely loud piece of crap.
We’re still pretty poor but not enough to be starving. I love my parents, but I know my mom and brother would leave my dad in a heartbeat if we had a better economic situation. He’s 90 now, and I don’t know how I’ll be able to sort out our living situation. I’m so sorry to my mom who had to put up with him.
It makes me uncomfortable when well-off older men in their 40s and 50s try to get with me. I don’t want to make the mistakes my mom did.”
Love And Hate
“I didn’t consider my mom a mail order bride since my parents were very much in love. However, they got in contact through mail, and my dad was looking for a wife from another country to bring to his little village.
It was only a 10-year difference between them. My mom was 40 when they had me, and my dad 50. They tried to have children for 17 years before that.
My dad’s family was not too happy about their marriage though. My dad’s sister refused to attend the wedding and treated my mom poorly. But they are not good people in general.
My childhood was okay. I have a lot of happy memories and love my parents more than anything, but they are people with flaws just like anyone else. My dad was a respected man but had some old views. My mom suffered from mental illnesses and had substance abuse tendencies. There was a lot of fighting. Then there was a separation when I was 12. My dad died less than half a year after they split.
After that, a lady came up to my mom saying how awful it was that my mom only stayed with my dad because of the green card and left him as soon as she could and that he died because of her. My mom’s neighbor and best friend literally hopped in the car and drove straight to the lady’s house to yell at her. Witch lady later apologized because of that, but it was hard to hear. My mom is doing much better now. She’s gotten professional help and we have a better relationship than ever before.”
Controlling
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“After my parents divorced in my early teens, my father got a mail order bride from Thailand.
Now, well over a decade later, they’re still together and have a son together. They seem happy together. The only downside is the fact she banned him from having anything to do with my siblings and me, and he listened. I haven’t seen him since I was 14 and have never met my half-brother.
I try to forgive him for it – he had a rough ten years or so and she came along at the end of it and made him happy. I can’t really hold that against him, even if it did cause him to be a pretty crappy father. Hopefully he’s better with the new kid.”
The Military Man
“My parents divorced when I was 2. He married my mom for selfish reasons. He wanted kids because everyone else has some. He was in his late-40s while my mom was 26 when they met. They fought constantly and even almost killed each other a few times. My mom admits to drinking chemicals to try and have a miscarriage while she was pregnant with me. She was so unhappy with him.
She is from the Philippines. Her family wanted her to have a better life in America with an American military man. Little did they know it would become a nightmare. There was a lot of abuse on both sides. They both became substances abusers. My brother and I still have a lot of issues because of our childhood.”
A Bride From The Philippines
“My mom was sort of a mail order bride from the Philippines. Her cousin offered my dad her as a wife if he paid. She married him when she was 19.
I understand why she did it. She grew up in poverty, and coming to a first world country seemed amazing. My father was a very nasty man; she stayed with him for about 10 years until I came along, and then she ran away when I was 9 months old. He only hit her once; she threatened him with a knife, so he never did it again (I found the court papers for the divorce). But abuse doesn’t have to be physical.
I don’t speak to him either. I had court-mandated visitations as a child, and his terrible behavior didn’t stop with her. I think my mom is a wonderful strong woman, and if I’m half as amazing as her, I’ll be happy.”
Similar To Other Marriages
“My mom was technically a mail order bride in the sense that my dad got her information from a ‘catalog’ of women from the Philippines. They wrote letters back and forth for a few months and met in person twice before getting married.
They were pretty different from one another and are incompatible in many ways. I watched them offend one another a lot. But I did enjoy growing up in a bi-cultural home. However, I don’t think my experience was much different from other bi-cultural families. My dad was very embracing of my mother’s heritage, and over time, became much more sensitive and understanding toward her. Seeing the struggles in the earlier part of their marriage shaped my views on marriage.”
‘I’m Not A Fan’
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“I’ve grown to despise any relationship between a seemingly older and more powerful white man and a younger submissive Asian woman. Especially when there’s a significant age gap between the couple, I am disgusted. I see it as the older man fetishizing the ‘exotic’ young woman and abusing his financial power over her.
This is mostly because that was the relationship between my father and mother as well as my father and stepmother. Neither relationship worked out, and a lot of family friends in similar situations also get divorced, so I don’t believe that kind of relationship works out ever. I don’t blame my mother or stepmother for getting into that kind of relationship as I understand the benefits of living in a financially stable household in a developed country, but I do think that my father’s behavior was outright disgusting in the demeaning way he treated them.
But while I hate those kinds of relationships, I do not dislike my father more than any other rebellious young adult. My father’s relationships disgust me but he is still my father, and I can’t thank him enough for raising me.”
The American Dream
“My parents were in an arranged marriage and did not know each other before they got married. My dad had immigrated to the U.S. as a pre-teen and went back to his home country to find a wife in his 20s. My mom was 19, never finished high school because she couldn’t afford it, and lived with her aunt who raised her. They married, and within two months, my mom was pregnant with me and on a plane to the U.S.
I have happy memories with my family, but a lot of it is overshadowed by my dad’s substance abuse and fights between my parents. My parents separated for two years when I was 5, got back together, had my brother, and finally divorced when I was about 14. I was so relieved when they finally split up because I was honestly tired of it. I haven’t spoken to my dad in a few years. I don’t want to make my life more dramatic than it is because plenty of people’s parents are divorced, but I do feel that the situation with the arranged marriage and divorce strained the relationship between my parents and me.
My mom also has never had a real relationship out of love, even though she’s been with the man she’s with now for five years. If anything, it’s more of him helping her out and her paying for his lifestyle.
The bright side though is my mom has a ton of perseverance, has pretty much raised both my brother and me by herself, and makes six figures as a small business owner. She’s a U.S. citizen now, has a nice lakeside house, and drives a Lexus (yes, we’re Asian). I did well in school, and she helped me financially through college (where I graduated from with a Computer Science degree so she can be proud). She still has struggles because of her limited English and never having finished high school, but she has accomplished her American dream despite the circumstances of how she got here.”
‘My Mother Wanted A Western Man’
“My mother was a mail order bride from Russia.
When my mother was in her late-20s, the Soviet Union collapsed, and it meant there were more foreigners in the country than before. All of my mother’s friends ended up finding foreign husbands from places like Germany and South Africa. At the time, my mother was married to my father and because of the piece of crap person that she is, decided she needed a slice of that pie for herself and found a wealthy Western man like her friends. She left my father who she had been married to for several years and started prowling Embassy Row in Moscow. This street had all of the consulates for the wealthy Western countries and she would loiter around there looking for men to pick up. This is how she met my stepfather, an Australian. He was your typical terrible Western man looking for a desperate woman to be his slave, and my mother was more than happy to oblige! He was physically and mentally abusive to her from day one, but she was determined to get that Hollywood lifestyle and would not be talked out of it. I met him for the first time when I was 5, and my blood ran cold the moment I set eyes on him. I got such a bad vibe right away. My mother tried to push me to be friendly with him and to ‘bond’ and that sort of stuff. The first time she left me alone with him, he played a series of cruel pranks on me (like taking my toys off me and putting them where I couldn’t reach them) and was physically abusive. This became a regular thing, and not a single care was given by my mother. They got married and then the time came for them to go home to his country, Australia. My grandparents fought my mother to leave me behind in Russia, and I begged to stay. But yeah, that didn’t go so well.
I ended up in Australia, met my step-grandparents who were even bigger sadists than my stepfather and my half-brother was born. The next decade was a whirlwind of abuse, and I was turned into more or less a domestic servant for my stepfather who was a substance abuser and a gambler that worked two days a week on average. My brother didn’t get off easy either, even though he was the biological child. In fact, he got double the beatings, and he was quite young too since we have a seven-year age gap. When I was 16, my mother FINALLY decided to leave him. A year later she found a new man who she has been with for 10 years now; he is a perfect person and the exact opposite of my stepfather. Last year when I visited Russia, my grandfather told me about my biological father. I was 2 when my mother kicked him out, so I don’t even know what his face looks like or anything about him. I found out that he fought hard to have me in his life but my mother went out of her way to prevent this. He became depressed and spent a lot of time in a mental hospital. Just before I came to Australia, my mother and stepfather went to his house and intimidated him into signing my release papers. When I was growing up, my mother told me that my father left her because he didn’t like me and that I was a bad child. I also found out that my father would meet my grandfather at a central train station in Moscow twice a year and my grandfather would pass on my latest photographs to him and give him updates. One day he didn’t come to the meeting they had planned, and my grandfather didn’t know what happened and couldn’t find anything out or reach him. I like to think that he got a new family and moved on, but also likely that he took his own life because he was still struggling with depression.
I still live in Australia, am happily married and my half-brother and I have a great relationship. I see my mother now and then and we act like none of the things that took place during that decade happened. But she knows what she did, I mean what can I say?
My stepfather ended up alone and living in a hovel. A few years ago he was crossing the road and got hit by a car and lost both his legs. We ended up reconnecting for a short time. There was a period where I felt bad for him and would go to his house to clean and help with groceries, but he was his usual abusive self, and my husband managed to talk some sense into me, so I stopped helping him. The last thing I heard was that he saved up his welfare money and goes on a big trip to America every year where he tells the strangers he meets that he’s a veteran and lost his legs in combat.”
An Arranged Marriage
“My dad was in Jordan, and my mom was in Saudi Arabia. He came to America to start working and make some money. He made enough to start looking for a wife so he just asked his dad to find him someone that fits his criteria and he found my mom. It was very traditional. Everyone from her family told her to do it so she could come to America and have a better life, so she did. There were no boyfriends or anything due to our religion – only engagement and marriage, but she just told me that when she saw him, she automatically loved him.
She was the typical housewife taking care of the kids, and he was the provider, who was just at work the whole time, improving his business. It was terrible in the beginning. Now that we are older, they are getting better and still have problems, but it’s good. They do love each other and developed a lot but now since they are Americanized they have way different views and wished they didn’t have kids early and that my mom would have worked in the beginning. They always tell me to not go for a housewife and tell my sisters not to try to find for a man just because he can provide for you. All in all, it’s good between them thanks to America, and they show love to each other and appreciate each other.”
The Best Thing
“My dad married a lady from the Philippines he had never met before the day she arrived in the country. Then they had to go through the farce of creating a ‘history’ for themselves for immigration. However, in the end, it turned out fine. They fell in love, my dad was like a kid giddy in his first real love affair (she was his third wife, my mom was his first).
Then sadly my dad got cancer 12 years after they married. His wife nursed him through it, and when he died, she and her family embraced his children (all seven of us) into THEIR family. She was the best thing that ever happened to my dad.”