Russian women seeking husbands is so 1998.  Russia has the world’s third fastest growing economy.  It’s a lot better place to find work than North America, EU or Japan.  That means not only work for women but work for their potential husbands too.  The Russian marriage rate is second only to the US in the industrialized world.  The divorce rate is very low by Anglo-European standards (about 15% now, historically in 2001 it reached 100% in reaction to the 1998 crisis) and the birth rate is at an historical high.  Average age of first marriage has moved up from 21 (still at college in Russia) to 24 (just finished college).  Abortions are plummeting.  Husbands with secure jobs, high marriage rates at an early age and lots of babies before settling down to a career (compared to greedy idiots faced with having a baby mid career and blaming the patriachy for the situation) is rather against the Anglo-American zeitgeist of my money & my control.  I would argue that Russian women are happier (Russia is shooting up the happiness indices as fast as alcohol consumption is dropping).  Russia is not the place to look for an economically vulnerable woman.

Nevertheless, my really quite beautiful 36 year old girlfriend of 2+ years (but we’ve known each other for 6), a lawyer turned realator, who, due to speculative investment in property, is now richer than me and knows it, continues to give me her time and affection.  She does have a teenage son but she keeps talking babies.  I’m 60.  She should hurry.  She refuses to move from Russia.  However, I speak fluent Russian and I have a business there so I am not exactly a mail order bride buyer.  It is also true that I may have my best years (money, status) in front of me yet.

They were dating for 2 years, which means 37 year old picked up his boyfriend when he was 19. 19! A year out of high school, when he was 35! That’s just crazy precisely for the reasons mentioned in the post — what does anyone know at 19? I know that I refused to date anyone under 20 by the time I was 23 simply because they all had that fresh-out-of-HS mindset.  

Yes but all men are inferior to you amy. You are typical of the women Saint Stephen and I are talking about. Most men are not up to your standards.

Would agree with the Norwegian women that men should seek partners in other countries where the women have lower standards ?

Just like Zaq pointed out; the open condemnation Karin received in the other thread for settling down with the cute, stable, loyal and devoted teacher actually says a lot. While it is true that the American woman will date the charming hunky bartender, or cohabitate with the gorgeously looking painter, when it eventually comes to marriage – they still seek out providers. I see no difference.  

Spin is not a lie, what the women say may be true from their point of view.

I notice that a woman commenting elsewhere on this blog knew Norwegian men who expressed zero interest in marrying Norwegian women because they were too “male”

So I guess that is the other side. Women may have changed, but men have not. They want traditional feminine women, not someone they are in competition with.

I cannot see that it is a good thing that female independence ultimately results in them failing to find a partner, and for men to have no choice but to go elsewhere where they are seen as more attractive.

The NY Times even showed that the phenomenon is not limited to upper middle class women.  Women in general will couple temporarily with men who don’t have it together, and even had children by them in some cases, but even a baby, which used to force a marriage and a traditional family doesn’t make these women marry those men.  And it kind of makes sense when the only thing the man provides is a warm body.

I’m not sure why men love to point out how women from Southeast Asia and Russia just are so much different from American women.  Actually they aren’t.  Their motives for marriage are just many decades behind our own,  and the economic conditions in their own countries make men in other countries better options than the ones at home, and it doesn’t take much to improve upon the lives that many of them have at home (Russians are well-educated but jobs can be hard to come by, and women outnumber men by a lot-in the old days, it was from the wars, and now alcoholism is a big issue).   I think Americans don’t understand Russia and think that everything there is hunky dory since they are no longer the big bad evil communist empire.  Only the collapse of their system meant that a few well-connected people were able to grab a lot of wealth and a lot of people were left with nothing and even the ones who are well-educated and have what here would be good white collar jobs make very little and struggle in daily life.  

A good question please look up
Statistics Norway report “Age differences at marriage – the times they are a changing ?”

This is fascinating. A country which used to have a traditional western age gap of two or three years between married partners has, within a generation changed dramatically.
The proportion of marriages entered into where the man is 10 years or more older than the woman is the group that has increased the most; by almost double.
One of the factors, is that Norwegian men are increasingly marrying mail order brides from non western countries especially Thailand, Russia and the Philippines. Staggeringly about 18% of all men IRRESPECTIVE of their age are now marrying women more than 8 years their junior.

This is a country that prides itself on equality. When I found this report, I did a little more digging and I came across a Norwegian discussion group talking about these foreign brides. There was a suggestion that Norwegian women who now were more educated, and financially independent, were requiring the men to at least match them (an idea you will see aired quite a lot on this blog !).
Some Norwegian women were putting the spin that the men not coming up to expectations were now forced to go elsewhere.