About: Mail-order bride

A mail-order bride is a woman who lists herself in catalogs and is selected by a man for marriage. In the twentieth century, the trend was primarily towards women living in developing countries seeking men in more developed nations. The majority of the women making use of these services in the late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century are from Southeast Asia, countries of the former Eastern Bloc and (to a lesser extent) Latin America. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, large numbers of eastern European women have advertised themselves in such a way, primarily from Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Georgia and Moldova. Men who list themselves in such publications are referred to as "mail-order husbands", although this is much less common.