True Love May Be Just a Click Away

PITTSBURGH—By the year 2000, more than 350 Internet agencies were involved in the business of e-mail-order marriages. The primary "consumers" of this type of service are Western men, and the "product offerings" are Asian, East European, and Latin American women. Nicole Constable, Pitt professor of anthropology and research professor in the University Center for International Studies, examines transnational relationships and marriage in her book Romance on a Global Stage (University of California Press, 2003), which debunks commonly held stereotypes about women and men seeking love through correspondence relationships.

"Although meeting marriage partners from abroad is not new, the Internet has fueled a global imagination and created a time-space compression that has greatly increased the scope and efficiency of introductions and communication between men and women from different parts of the world," Constable writes in Romance on a Global Stage.

Beginning in 1998, Constable communicated via the Internet with several hundred men and women who were involved in correspondence relationships. Constable later met in person with many of these men and women and also obtained permission, as a researcher, to join four private Internet chat groups, which allowed her to follow the conversations occurring in chat and news groups. Her study primarily focused on the views and experiences of Chinese and Filipino women and American men, who were all contemplating correspondence, actively engaged in correspondence, or recently had been married as a result of correspondence.

The women Constable met did not conform to the popular image of mail-order brides as passive victims motivated solely by economic hardship. Likewise, the men she met did not fit the stereotype of an abuser looking for his next victim. According to Constable, such representations reduce mail-order marriages to a form of capitalist market, overlooking the extent of the women's selectivity and choice as well as the value both male and female correspondents place on love, romance, and marriage.

"In writing this book, it is my hope, if not to have dispelled such images, at least to have presented equally compelling, though much less sensationalist, images of the women and men who meet and participate in transnational correspondence marriages," Constable added.

###

2/5/04/tmw