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Mail-Order Bride

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Here comes the bride, delivered here on time.
"I don't know what sort of wacky-ass mailing list I'm on. Did someone sign me up for this, or is the logic something like 'This guy has a Web page. Ergo, he has to import potential mates from former USSR nations.'"?

The Mail-Order Bride plot line is where a man marries a woman from a poor country sight unseen or seen once. Usually played for laughs or for very dark drama, but can also lead to Marriage Before Romance.

A common setting for this is in The Western, but can easily evolve in any situation where there is a surplus of men in one place and a surplus of poor women in another place. The World War II version of this trope would be the "Army War Brides" movie. In that time period, many soldiers returned to their home country with a foreign bride. The bride's country of origin is stereotypically somewhere in Eastern Europe (particularly Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, or, in older works, Latvia, Romania, or Bulgaria), Southeast Asia (usually Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, or Cambodia), or Central America.

If the trope is dealt with in a drama, it will be in a series like Law & Order. The mail-order bride plot causes a crime or scam that results in either an elaborate Gold Digger or Con Artist scheme if she's the perp (though usually a side of Sympathetic Criminal may be at play as she's escaping her home country's poverty). If he's the perp (or if it's SVU), it's a combo plate of forced prostitution, Domestic Abuse, Marital Rape License, forced labor, and/or murder. The man's played as a loser, misogynist, and creep who resorted to exploiting the desperation of women in third-world poverty and treating her as a combination of domestic labor and Sex Slave. Add plot complications caused by the bride's uncertain legal status.note 

It's also the fodder for an entire genre of romance novels, in which a young woman from east of the Mississippi becomes a mail-order bride for a man who has gone out West to seek his fortune. Naturally given the genre, after the usual round of drama they genuinely fall in love.note 

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Examples:

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    Comic Books 
  • The infamous 'Russian gamer brides' fake ads from Knights of the Dinner Table.
  • Lucky Luke's Wife had the titular cowboy escort a large number of women across the land to their potential husbands, due to a serious gender imbalance in their respective communities. (Curiously, it was the women who got to pick from pictures of the men, while the men had no say.) The problem arises when one girl's betrothed is temporarily unavailable and Lucky Luke has to fill the husband role. It turns out to be an attempt to ensnare Luke so he can become their sheriff permanently.
  • In a graphic novel entitled Mail Order Bride, a young Korean woman battles with her husband's fetishization of Asian women, and his expectations of a 'mail order bride'.
  • During one of his adventures, Tex Willer had to escort a number of women across the country while they went to their potential husbands. Horribly Subverted at the end when it's revealed it was a scam to lure young women and force them into prostitution, and while this group escapes their fate due to Tex gunning down the bandits the scam had been going on for quite some time.
  • One The Simpsons comic saw Bart accidentally order one of these when trying to order a decommissioned submarine. While she wants to stay in America, she can't unless she's married; since Bart is obviously too young, he and Lisa try to introduce her to Springfield's selection of bachelors to help her out. She ends up so revolted by them all that she flees back to her native country.

    Documentary 
  • The documentary Love Me covers the experiences of six (five of them middle-aged) men who attempt to get a mail-order bride from Ukraine; two of them do end up Happily Married by the end of the documentary, while three end up getting scammed, and one ultimately decides that this is not for him.
  • Another documentary, Diary Of A Mail Order Bride, deals with three men (two from the U.K. one from the U.S.) trying to get a Russian bride. One does get married to her, another is jilted by his Russian girlfriend, and the third leaves empty-handed (after being both scammed and rejected).

    Fan Works 

    Film — Animated 
  • In the animated film Gay Purr-ee, Mewsette, a naive cat from the country, is tricked into being a mail-order bride to a rich American cat.

    Film — Live Action 
  • Played very seriously in Birthday Girl, where an Englishman hires a mail-order Russian bride. Then she and some accomplices extort him into robbing the bank that he works for using a variant on the "Spanish Prisoner" act.
  • The astonishingly bad 1971 movie Blindman. A blind but deadly gunman is hired to escort fifty mail-order brides to their miner husbands. His business partners double-cross him, selling the women to bandit Domingo. Blindman heads into Mexico in pursuit.
  • In DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story, one character is shown to have an Asian mail-order bride that hates him. Hubby is completely oblivious.
    Gordon's Wife: *makes L sign on forehead with horrific scowl*
    Gordon: L for Love!
  • Flower Drum Song revolves around this trope.
  • The Harvey Girls stars Judy Garland as one of these, but when she arrives, she takes one look at the prospective groom and gets a job as a Harvey Girl instead. (The Harvey Girls, who actually existed, were waitresses at Harvey House restaurants.)
  • In the 1949 movie, I Was a Male War Bride, Cary Grant plays the part of a Frenchman who marries a female American soldier at the end of WWII and encounters various problems as a male version of this trope.
  • In Lars and the Real Girl, Lars claims to be dating a girl who came from a horribly abusive life in a foreign country... but it turns out she's a sex doll.
  • The 2003 comedy Mail Order Bride concerns a mafioso trying to catch a Russian mail-order bride who scammed several of his fellow men before escaping back to her home country.
  • An Older Than Television example is featured in the 1912 silent movie Mail Order Wife. The twist here is that said "mail-order wife" already knew one of the main characters, both having been romantically involved years ago. After breaking off the relationship, the man joined forces with a partner to run a ranch, and said partner writes to a mail-order house for a wife, which turns out to be the other man's ex. The old love awakens and the partner who was to marry her at first is forced to give her up to the other man.
  • In the 2004 comedy Mail Order Wife, a documentarian funds a doorman's East Asian mail-order wife in exchange for the right to film the experience. It turns into a Love Triangle when the wife also gets involved with the documentarian.
  • In the 1954 movie The Naked Jungle, Charleton Heston plays a wealthy cocoa plantation owner in Venezuela who sends for a mail-order bride, who is a widow from New Orleans. It is actually a marriage by proxy with his brother standing in for him during the legal ceremony. After she arrives and they meet, the two strong-willed individuals both at first regret the arrangement. However, a plague of army ants allows true love to triumph.
  • The plot of Once Upon a Time in the West is kicked off when a mail-order bride (played by the incomparable Claudia Cardinale) arrives at her new home just hours after everyone there was slaughtered as part of a land grab. Definitely not played for yuks since he wanted a mother for his children and she wanted a new life.
  • The Picture Bride (1994) features the related early 20th-century practice of "picture brides", a sort of matchmaking service where immigrants would be paired with brides from their native countries using only pictures and recommendations from their families. Here, the story follows the bride, who is at first dismayed that her husband is much older than in the photo and that she will have to work in the sugarcane fields, but tries to make the best of it.
  • Prairie Fever: The Preacher Man of Clearwater arranged for 17 mail-order brides to be delivered, but three of them go mad from the 'prairie fever', and Preston Briggs is hired to deliver them to the railway station in Carson City so they can be quietly shipped back east.
  • In the 1932 drama The Purchase Price, Joan (played by Barbara Stanwyck) decides to be a mail-order bride to escape her gangster ex-boyfriend and begin a new life.
  • The Australian film Russian Doll features a Russian mail-order bride arriving in Australia only to find her groom has passed away. A Citizenship Marriage is still arranged however when the married man she subsequently has an affair with 'engages' her to his best friend so she can stay in the country and they can continue the affair.
  • Screwed In Tallinn is a 1999 Swedish Mockumentary which indulges in the awkwardness of bride import, however before it became a common phenomenon in Sweden.
  • Played to heartwarming effect in Sweet Land, where a young Minnesota farmer gets a German mail-order bride around WWI. Needless to say, Germans were not exactly popular at the time, but the farmer and his wife fall in love, and he defends her against the angry townspeople.
  • A mail-order bride is also in Wagons East!. Very refined lady, horrified to discover that she's stuck with seven guys who make Neanderthals look civilized.
  • In the 1951 movie Westward the Women, an entire wagon train made up of over a hundred women looking for a second chance is led to a male-only settlement in California. Due to a loss of male workers on the wagon train, the leader has to train the entire group of women into tough, capable Homesteader Wives, much to the delight of the men when they arrive. Lots of implied happy pairings ensue.
  • Zandy's Bride: Hannah puts an ad for marriage in a newspaper and the one who responds is surly cattle rancher Zandy. The two get married the day she arrives, which is also the first time they meet. Their marriage is very troubled at first, but they gradually warm up to each other.

    Literature 
  • Achimas Welde from The Death of Achilles orders brides every half a year or so (with time-limited "service contracts"). He never marries them, of course, given his job, but treats them as legitimate wives for as long as they stay with him.
  • Honolulu follows the saga of Regret, a Korean girl who travels to Hawaii as a mail-order bride in order to escape life in restrictive, Japanese-occupied Korea in the early 20th century.
  • Much Ado About Grubstake: Bridget, the hotel maid and waitress, came to Grubstake from Ireland (where she was an unhappy servant girl) as a mail-order bride for a successful prospector. His claim petered out before she came, and he skipped town without waiting for her. She's rather tranquil about the situation, as she likes her job and doesn't know if she would have loved her husband-to-be.
  • Picture Bride is a novel by Yoshiko Uchida about a Japanese woman who comes to America and is later imprisoned in internment camps.
  • A Reliable Wife involves a rich, lonely man in rural early 20th century Wisconsin and his mail-order bride, who has...an agenda unrelated to being a good wife.
  • John McPhee's "Rising From the Plains" (part of his US geology series) opens with a young woman from a posh eastern finishing school getting off a stagecoach in the center of Wyoming in a blizzard. She was on her way to marry the protagonist's rancher father (who happened to be the nephew of John Muir, not that that has anything to do with the bride.)
  • Sarah, Plain and Tall, a children's book published in 1985, later made into a movie and stage play, is about a mail-order bride in the late 19th century who has been ordered by a widowed farmer who really needs somebody to look after his children.
  • Briefly referenced in The Shepherd's Crown as available for the lumberjacks in the remote forest areas of the Ramtops. This being the Discworld, the "mail-order" bit is taken entirely literally, with the brides ordered from the same catalogue the lumberjacks use to buy everything else.
  • A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian has very little to do with tractors but is actually about an older gentleman marrying a woman who is just using him to get a visa.
  • In Ann Turner's Third Girl from the Left, Sarah answers a classified ad requesting a wife for a cattle rancher in Montana because she's tired of her Maine hometown. Unfortunately, the rancher is a bit older, and life in Montana a bit harsher, than she was led to believe.

    Live Action TV 
  • The Reality Show 90 Day Fiance deals with couples proving that they're not this. Several of the couples are average-looking Americans with attractive foreign wives (whom they often barely knew before getting married) and a lot of the plot is them getting over cultural differences, as well as proving it's not just a Citizenship Marriage.
  • In The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. Brisco & Bowler help a trio of women who had set themselves up as brides to some western characters sight-unseen. Brisco talks to them about how awful this idea is and they agree - although apparently, it's better than the alternative.
  • Barney Miller: Inspector Luger has a Filipina mail-order bride. He coerced Barney into writing his letters for him. They remain (more-or-less happily) married through the end of the series.
  • Black Saddle: In "Client: Dawes", Clay defends a mail-order bride who is accused of murder when he new husband dies in a seeming accident. Maggie Dawes mentions her husband having picked her out of a catalogue.
  • A friend of the Cartwrights ordered one in Bonanza. He broke his leg, so he asked Hoss to pick her up for him. Unfortunately, the woman becomes attracted to Hoss, much to his horror and to the friend's anger.
  • One episode of Bones features a body with all its bones removed. It turns out the woman was a Chinese mail-order bride, but her American husband got a refund because she was sickly (and therefore, not what he ordered). Rather than lose their investment in her, the company then killed her and sold her bones to a local Chinese family to act as a "Ghost Bride" for their dead son (at least in-universe, a Chinese man needs a wife in the afterlife, so if he dies without one, the family acquires a skeleton for that purpose). Angela somehow finds the conclusion romantic.
  • Played with on CSI. One man ordered a Russian mail-order bride and then killed her when she wasn't really in love with him and was planning to leave him for a less-controlling man. By the time the CSIs find her body years later, he's already remarried to another mail-order bride from China.
  • Dead Man's Gun: In "Mail Order Bride", a blacksmith sends away for a bride, but his delivery includes the Dead Man's Gun.
  • Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman: Loren seeks out one of these, realizing that he's getting on at his age and not wanting to be alone for the rest of his life, but ultimately decides against it.
  • Frasier: When Woody from Cheers comes to visit Frasier he reveals that Cliff Clavin almost got married to a woman he met this way, but she called it off after spending a few days with him before the wedding.
    Frasier: Oh, gosh. I'm so sorry for Cliff.
    Woody: Yeah. She said she was homesick. That Bosnia must be a beautiful place.
  • An episode of Have Gun – Will Travel has Paladin escorting a mail-order bride to her new husband out west.
  • In the first episode of Here Come the Brides the Bolt brothers have a hundred brides from Massachusetts brought to Seattle to keep their logging crew from quitting.
  • It is implied that Alan Partridge's girlfriend Sonja in the second series of I'm Alan Partridge came to England on such an arrangement. She's a gregarious woman who clearly cares for Alan, which is a bit unfortunate for her since he views her with little more than contempt and is clearly only in it for the ego boost of getting to sleep with someone 17 years younger than him.
  • One episode of Law & Order had a mail-order bride desperate for a real life, whereas her husband just wanted a maid he could fuck. The bride and her lover were two of the more sympathetic murderers in the franchise's history.
  • A similar episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit had the detectives learning that their Victim of the Week was one of three sisters who came to America this way and that her husband had been abusive as well as being like the husband described above (he wasn't her killer, however). Her twin sister's husband was much nicer and the two are Happily Married. The twins' younger sister was rejected by her husband and forced into prostitution so the woman who arranged the whole thing could get her money back.
  • Series three of Little Britain had Dudley and Ting Tong, the characters of a repulsive middle-aged man and his Thai mail-order wife. Each episode would reveal something untoward about Ting Tong (such as that she was actually a "ladyboy" and born in London) until she eventually invites her whole family to Britain, kicks Dudley out of his house and turns it into a Thai restaurant. Little Britain Abroad shows that Dudley's brother has a Russian mail-order bride as well.
  • An episode of The Lone Ranger zigzags this: a Chinese Launderer and his mail-order fiancee are very happy with each other, but a group of townspeople use increasingly nasty methods to try to break them up or even kill one or both of them: they are perfectly happy using the laundryman's services, but they don't want any children increasing the town population of Chinese(-American) people.
  • Subverted in Malcolm in the Middle. Francis' elderly roommate in Alaska announces he is getting a mail-order bride. Francis tries to convince him not to, and on the day she is supposed to arrive, they find out it was a blow-up sex doll. It is actually quite a Tear Jerker when this is revealed.
  • Midnight Sun (2016): Sparen marries a Thai woman, Mabée, whom he met online, so she can get citizenship in Sweden.
  • The Murdoch Mysteries episode "Ministry of Virtue" is set around a Christian charitable organisation, the Virtue Ministry, which gives female convicts in London's Holloway Women's Prison the option of being transported to Canada for "virtuous marriage" to the men who've paid their passage (based on the Real Life "Salvation Girls"). Murdoch is uncertain about the morality of this but rationalises that they had a choice. Dr Ogden doesn't feel they had any choice at all, while Inspector Brakenreid opposes it for the opposite reason; the UK is sending criminals to run free in his city. The Victim of the Week is one of the brides, and it eventually transpires that in fact the organiser's "charges" killed her, and the supposed victim took her place.
  • Jasper from My Name Is Earl has a Mail Order Bride from Russia. He lives in a storage container and tends to peddle *cough* suspect wares, though he told her he lived in a fancy gated community.
  • Aussie soap opera Neighbours had Lou - a man well into his sixties - lie about his age in order to purchase a Russian mail-order bride from the Internet. When said bride, Mishka, arrived, it turned out she had lied about her age too and was about as old as he was. The pair hit it off, but the relationship is cut short after Mishka (who's in Australia illegally) bribes an immigration official and gets deported.
  • Healy from Orange Is the New Black married Katya as a mail-order bride from the Ukraine.
  • Quantum Leap once had Sam leap into a man who just got back from WWII in time for his new Japanese war bride to introduce herself to his family.
  • An episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch had Salem stealing the aunts' money to buy whatever he wants, a Japanese mail-order bride being one of them. At the end of the episode, the bride shows up and merely shrugs when she learns her new husband is a talking cat.
  • In the German improvisational comedy show Schillerstrasse, Cordula gets the direction to believe Maddin's new girlfriend is a mail-order bride from Russia.
  • "Mudd's Women" in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode of the same name. Harry Mudd is taking them to be the brides of a mining colony.
  • Played in the short-lived sitcom Thanks. Differing from the usual, she's an English woman being sent to Puritan-era America. When she arrives looking like a modern-day supermodel, her husband-to-be is horrified. (People of that era having a much more healthy ideal of beauty.) She ends up with the town's blacksmith instead.
  • Subverted in an episode of Veronica Mars. A woman claiming to be a Russian immigrant looking for an ex-boyfriend she met through the Internet turns out to be a member of the Russian mafia searching for a witness.
  • Louis Theroux examined the phenomenon in the Weird Weekends episode "Thai Brides", even going through part of the process himself (though stopping before actually going on a date, since he already had a girlfriend). Surprisingly, not all of them were of the Ugly Guy, Hot Wife variety.
  • Wings had Roy order a Russian mail-order bride. The bride showed up and it was clear that she really didn't like him, but she had no choice but to marry him. At the last minute, Roy has a change of heart and lets her go to marry a man she fell for.
  • Wonderfalls: A boy orders a Russian bride for his widower dad. Although, at first, the boy seemed intent on marrying her himself!

    Music 
  • Blues Legend Champion Jack DuPree's Blues For Everybody features a song called "Mail Order Woman" that extolls the perceived virtues of this trope in his comedic "harelip" voice.

    Newspaper Comics 
  • Parodied in Dilbert, when Wally mail-orders a bride from Elbonia. She turns out to be a pig (literally).
    • This apparently caused protests from some men with mail-order brides, as well as some groups who accused the creator of racism. Reportedly he was surprised, as he merely meant to imply the company was faulty. Elbonia is generally portrayed as Cloudcuckooland in any case.

    Stand-Up Comedy 
  • Josh Blue has a bit about ordering a Korean mail-order bride. The bride, on arriving, declares his apartment to be an Asian household now and demands he take off his shoes. Blue, who has cerebral palsy, responds, "Do you have any idea how long it took me to put these on?"

    Theater 
  • In They Knew What They Wanted, Tony never even spoke to Amy, he just saw her once at an Italian restaurant in San Francisco. He then contacted her boss and wrote her a letter proposing marriage, which she accepted.

    Webcomics 
  • In the Western arc of Arthur, King of Time and Space, Isolde is a mail-order bride to Mark, as the closest Western equivalent of marrying a princess you've never met for political reasons.
  • One of the main characters from Krakow accidentally orders one from Russia. It turns out to be his Russian professor's sister. Then he orders another one and it's the professor's mother.
  • A September 2002 comic for Something*Positive has Aubrey reading off descriptions from a website for Russian amputee mail-order brides.

    Western Animation 
  • Steve and his friends order a Russian mail-order bride in American Dad!. She disappears at the end of the episode, of course. Lampshaded in "Escape From Pearl Baily" when Toshi says "Didn't I have a wife once?"
  • Aqua Teen Hunger Force features Carl and Shake going halfsies on a mail-order bride...only to have her barricade herself in Carl's house when she first sees the two of them.
  • Beavis and Butt-Head - an agency dumps a Russian woman on a looking-to-score Butt-Head...she's repulsed by him and smacks him if he gets near her. She then hooks up with thug Todd, and Butt-Head sees the bright side of it, where if Todd is doing it with his "wife", that somehow makes them related. Butt-Head loves Todd...
  • Clerks: The Animated Series: Parodied when Randall orders a Japanese mail-order groom by mistake, who forces Randall to walk three steps behind, not talk, and have dinner on the table 5 minutes before the husband gets home. He also has Randall dress and act like the Yamato Nadeshiko type and eat sushi off of his bare body:
    Randall: It wasn't all bad.
  • The Duckman episode "My Feral Lady" has Duckman ordering a bride who turns out to be a jungle savage.
  • Johnny Bravo had a second season episode about this, "To Helga and Back". Johnny ordered a girl from a dating service who turned out to be a Brawn Hilda. He did eventually fall for her after many Zany Schemes to repulse her but lost her when he started acting like his usual, narcissistic self.
  • Monkey Dust had a recurring sketch much like the Little Britain example above, where a truly disgusting middle-aged man has a mail-order bride who remains permanently adoring of him no matter what repulsive thing he says or does.
  • On The Oblongs, one of the main characters' co-workers buys a mail-order bride. By the time she got to The Valley, she was dead. No one had drilled holes in the box.
  • A throwaway gag on The Simpsons referred to Groundskeeper Willie ordering a mail-order bride but being too cheap to pay the postage and her being held at the post office.
    • In another episode, Marge is kidnapped by a biker gang, and Homer asks Bart to call a "Korean Love Brides" number if he fails to save her.
    • At one point, Moe did have a mail-order bride, who left Moe because she was homesick for her previous life: diving for tourist pennies in a swamp in Micronesia.
    • One episode reveals that Selma once ordered a mail-order husband. Upon opening the door, she discovered "he" was really a cardboard cutout of a man in a suit carrying flowers.
    • The episode "From Russia Without Love" centers on Bart pranking Moe by ordering him a mail-order bride from Russia off the dark web.
  • The Toonsylvania episode "Phil's Brain" had Igor order a mail-order brain bride named Sarah Bellum for Phil's brain Larry Cortex. In the end, Sarah leaves Larry and runs off with Phil's pancreas Stu.
  • At one point in The Venture Brothers, Rusty asks Russian assassin Molotov Cocktease if Russian mail-order brides are any good, because the Chinese one was already dead when he opened the box.

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