Russian Bride Website Experiences and Links

Chances are you reached this page from my page about Russian Bride Scams.
If not, you really need to read something about this problem before you get into Russian personal ads.

I wrote my page about scams in response to getting scammed several years ago. About a year later, I wrote this page to recommend the few websites that I thought were worthy of being recommended after I noticed that they would pay commissions for this. I looked at dozens of websites, but only a small number appeared to have even the potential to be useful. Where I had experience as a paying customer of these websites, I wrote about that. I also wrote fairly detailed descriptions of their services and prices, but I have taken out most of those details since that was a few years ago and the prices and other details of services have changed. One thing that hasn't changed, though, is that the websites I rated highly several years ago still seem to be the best ones. And some that I didn't like have disappeared.       The following banner links lead to sites with the following important features: Plenty of ladies' profiles. You can tell how old the information is. Search engine, including search by word, age, and other criteria. You can submit your own profile with photo. Organised tours to meet Russian ladies, except one. Not a fly-by-night operation.       I have been to Russia by myself and I would do it again, but if you are thinking of going to Russia, I have to tell you that is far more difficult than travelling in western Europe, especially if you don't speak Russian. Also, you can't realistically book a trip to Russia with just any travel agent - you need a travel agent who knows Russia and knows the Russian visa rules. If you're going to do that, you might as well use one of these organised tours run specialists in exactly what you're looking for. The best sales pitch for tours is by RussianWomenAreBetter.com (A Foreign Affair)       Now some comments about the importance of some of the features I mentioned above. The first time I bought addresses from a website, it was a site with thousands of ladies. I bought 41 addresses. I got only one positive response. When I say positive, I mean the lady wrote me a detailed letter and was interested in knowing me better. I also received one very nice letter from a lady telling me how much she liked my letter, but that she was already engaged and would be moving to the US in a few months. I received one other very short letter written in poor English that did not seem meaningful or sincere, and there was nothing in the letter that seemed to have anything to do with me other than my name at the start. Another lady sent me email inviting me to visit her when I was near her town, but she sent this message when I was already in Europe so I did not read it until I came home. Those are all the responses that I got to my first 41 letters - rather less than the 30% response rate the website said was typical. Other than unrealistic advertising, I realised that there are various factors that contributed to my low response rate: Some of the ladies submitted their profiles a long time ago. I only wrote to beautiful young ladies. I did not use registered mail. I used snailmail. Many of the ladies really aren't interested in foreign men.       Later I got more addresses from the same company (I had already paid for 50 addresses) and got a better response rate. The important difference was the age of the information. In the first batch of addresses, the ladies had submitted their profiles up to four years earlier. In the second batch, I only got addresses that were new since the first batch I bought. I have met many women in eastern Europe, mostly without the help of any agencies, although some of the women I've met had profiles on websites. I know one lady who has had her profile on websites for a couple of years and is still waiting for her Prince Charming to come from the West, but from what I've seen it seems that in most cases if a woman wants to get married, she will find a husband without waiting for years, and most of them are not so keen on marrying a foreigner that they will ignore local men. So if you want my advice: Before you buy contact information, make sure you know how old it is. If an agency says that all the ladies are single and want to marry a foreign man, don't assume it's true.       My response rate was also low because I only wrote to very desirable women. Since then I have bought more addresses from more agencies, and I have continued only to buy addresses of beautiful young women. I'm not willing to compromise on this, because if I'm willing to settle for women I don't really feel attracted to, then I might as well settle for the kind of woman I could get around here. However, you are not me, and if you find your response rates are not good enough, you might improve your odds by compromising a little. As I've already indicated, contrary to what some websites may tell you, desirable women who want to get married are not idly waiting for a proposal by mail.       Mail is not reliable in the former Soviet Union. It's better in some parts than others, but I know that some letters I've sent by ordinary mail did not reach their destinations. The problem is that unscrupulous postal workers in very poor countries may steal any foreign envelope to see if there's anything valuable inside. Since I learned this lesson, I always send letters registered. This is an expensive way to send mail. Even one registered letter that I sent disappeared. After I complained to my local post office, the foreign post office had to pay a fine to me that was about six times the cost of sending the letter. A cheaper method is to send postcards. Every postcard I ever mailed to Europe was non-registered and reached its destination. Many agencies sell email forwarding (like this) to deliver your letters to the former Soviet Union. The way it works is you email your letter to the forwarding service and their agent in Russia prints the letter and sends it from there by ordinary mail. This is faster and cheaper than sending registered mail from your home country, and your letter isn't in a foreign envelope so it's unlikely to get stolen. These services can handle photos, too. I haven't tried these services myself, partly because I don't want to deprive my correspondent of a hand-written letter, and I don't know whether they print photos with the same quality that I get when I get my photos printed here.       It's hard to develop any kind of relationship by snailmail, but in the former Soviet Union, many people do not have access to email and the internet.       Women whose profiles are on websites do not all have the same level of interest in foreigners. Even on agencies' websites I've seen a couple of mentions of cases where a girl's profile was actually submitted by her mother. I met a lady who submitted her profile only because a friend of hers wanted to submit a profile and didn't want to go to the agency alone. One solution to this is "reverse" ads. That is, you submit your profile and ladies write to you by snailmail or email.       Enough talk... let's see some women:

Elena Petrova Elena's Models       Elena Petrova is a Russian lady who met her South African husband with the help of an agency. She started her website to tell her story and share information, but it turned into a business. As well as having many women's profiles, this is a very informative website.       When I was a customer or even a potential customer, Elena always responded promptly to email I sent her.

Russian Women Are Better (A Foreign Affair)       A Foreign Affair was started in 1995 by three American men who each used their own company to meet their wives. RussianWomenAreBetter.com is basically the AFA database with a nicer look. These websites have a huge database with an excellent search engine. The search engine shows the most recent profiles first. The only significant shortcoming is that they do not explicitly say how old each lady's profile is - you have to estimate this from the ID number. You can do this by going to their page showing their most recent weekly update to see how high the latest ID numbers are and how many profiles were in the latest update. They have profiles of South American women, too.

Cherry Blossoms       Mike Krosky started Cherry Blossoms in Hawaii in 1974 to help American men meet Japanese ladies. Years later, Cherry Blossoms started collecting profiles of European ladies, too.       When I was a customer of Cherry Blossoms I sent them email several times and they generally responded quickly and effectively.

A Pretty Woman       A Pretty Woman has thousands of profiles. Judging by appearances, they are very selective in the profiles that they add to the site. The biggest shortcoming of this site is that the only way to tell when a profile was added is to find it through the menu of update dates and for this you have to go to the bottom of the "New Girls" page. One significant bonus of this site is that you can read the original letters that ladies sent to the agency. When I used this feature at Cherry Blossoms, I found that the letters sometimes were very interesting - some women seemed much more serious than others.

The sites above are the best of the big sites on the web, except for one other big database out there shared by several websites, but they won't give me anything for linking to them here so I won't link to them here. Plenty of other website operators have offered me commissions but I have not linked to them because I am not convinced that their services are ones I would recommend. A smaller site that looks okay is Volga Girl.

I considered providing a list of links here to every website of Russian ladies' personal ads that I've seen, but other people have tried this and I get the impression it's not worth the effort. One problem is that hundreds of silly little websites have come and gone and it's too much work to keep a list of working websites up-to-date. The other problem is that a list like that isn't really helpful because most websites that remain online aren't actually very useful. The websites I've mentioned on this page may be only a small fraction of the total number of websites out there, but I think they contain more than half of all the worthwhile content.