Prior Preparations
As I have noted before, earlier this fall I spent a month in St. Petersburg,
Russia and spent time with 13 ladies. In reports to follow, I will describe
my trip in getting to SPb, and my visits with each of the ladies.
But before those items, I want to describe the very important work that is
done in the USA in preparing for the trip and some of my motivations. I
have gotten help and tips from hundreds of persons, and now I want to try
to help those who are getting started in this exciting undertaking. Also, by
describing my situation, I can allow the reader to perhaps see where some
of my criteria might be different from theirs because of differing ages,
circumstances, etc.
First, it is important to state that I did not undertake this with the idea that I
am totally committed to finding a Russian Wife. It seems to me that many
men have this ingrained in their minds, but I do not. To me it is just
another option. So why did I even think about going to Russia? Because
a friend of mine has been married to a Russian woman for about 5 years,
and both he and his wife kept continually bringing it up to me (the idea of
looking for a RW) after I was single again. Even though the wife is a very
charming lady and they are extremely happy, I kept resisting because I
simply do not hate AW the way many guys seem to. I had a very
successful marriage to a quite wonderful AW for nearly 28 years. But she
and I both came to the conclusion that we simply wanted to head in
different directions in our remaining years.
Second, I have a grown daughter and grown son, and do not wish in the
least to have any more children. This meant that I could not be looking for
a much younger woman who might want to have children with me, and I did
not want to take on existing children who were not at least late teenagers.
Plus, since my daughter is in her late 20s, I simply could not see myself
having a wife who was only a few years older than her. These
considerations allowed me to set a minimum age of 40 years for the
woman. It didn’t necessarily follow that some of that age wouldn’t have
children that were ‘too young’ for my criteria, but one has to start
somewhere.
Third, I am an independent business consultant with a moderately
successful business. As such, I am able to take as much time off from
work as I want to, provided I am willing to go without the income.
Therefore, I opted to spend a month on this, my first trip.
Fourth, in my business I cannot afford to have any ‘down time,’ and I am
above all, a planner. I know how to do it, and I do it. Also, in my business
and personal life, I interact with hundreds of women. I like women very
much, am very comfortable with them, and I have no problems or hang ups
about having multiple girlfriends; and I don’t care if they have multiple
boyfriends. My only rule is don’t tell me about the other guys. These ideas
carried over to my plans for a trip to Russia. That meant that I was going
to correspond with and meet multiple women, and I would have many
backups available to mitigate against ‘down time.’
Fifth, there is considerable talk on these discussion sites about guys who
go over with stars in their eyes and perhaps are focused only on one lady.
And, at the opposite end of the spectrum, there is also talk about guys
who go over for a ‘sex tour.’ I know that I fall in neither category, but I
know that I will draw some criticisms from my reports. I am seriously
interested in finding a wife. But at the same time, I do not feel that I have a
‘wife vacancy’ (this concept is from KenC) position that must be filled with
great haste. However, I am also seriously addicted to sex. I always follow
the normal male procedures on dates with women and if it leads to sex,
even early sex, I go with the flow. So if anyone wants to accuse me of
going on a sex tour just because I had sex, well that is your right, but it was
not my over-riding reason for going to Russia. If it were, it was very
expensive sex, and more importantly much too time consuming to set up.
For those who are virgins and/or want to think that marrying virgins is the
only way to go, you will not enjoy reading my reports at all.
Below are listed some of the ‘rules’ that I set for my search procedure.
These ideas were gleaned from my readings of several message boards,
and from private discussions with several men who have had previous
experience in this endeavor. And yes, I have stolen most of these ideas
and even some of the exact wording from others; but by now, I have lost
track of who said what so I can’t always give credit.
1) A very big net (I think JackB probably has a copywrite on this term, so I
will give him credit here) must be cast, not in terms of physical location, but
in terms of the number of women for initial contacts. The resulting number
of viable candidates are very small compared to the initial contacts that
must be made. Any attempts to go with a small number of women will
possibly end in disaster. Over time the women on your list will start to
decline for any number of reasons, and you will be left scrambling as your
trip approaches to find more women; a circumstance which will lead to the
lowering of your absolute standards. Also, of course, the women can
cancel out after your trip is already booked (non refundable tickets paid for
etc.) This dictates that, in addition to the maximum number you can
reasonably spend time with, you should have an equal number ready as
'back ups.'
And for you bleeding hearts that think this is unfair to the women . . . wake
up! At least with the 40 year olds that I was dealing with, they were mostly
all very aware of what was going on and that they may or may not make
the ‘final cut.’ They were also involved in the same process on their end
(correspondence with multiple guys) and a few even slipped into my final
group who admitted to me that they were just using me to practice their
English, etc.
2) English skills for the women are a must. If the English skills are not
there, the woman must be eliminated, regardless of her beauty. This is a
very hard rule to stick to, but the results will likely be disastrous otherwise.
3) Only consider women who can correspond via e-mail. It is just too
inefficient use of time to spend it on regular mail. Also to stay within the
time period noted below, e-mail is a must. Otherwise a sufficient number
of messages cannot be exchanged to allow the parties to become
comfortable with one another.
4) The overall education level is also very important. Upon meeting, the
women are just as likely to be repulsed by an 'over educated' or 'over
dressed' man, as they are by a man in the exactly opposite category. This
doesn't mean that the two must have exactly equivalent educations, but
any man with an advanced university degree should not even consider a
woman without at least a bachelors degree.
5) The physical area of the search must be narrow. The time lost in
traveling between cities simply dictates a narrow geographic area. I chose
St. Petersburg because of its large size and its many cultural attractions.
6) There is some ‘optimum length of time’ for correspondence. Too short
and you don’t know much about each other. Too long and it may get
boring. Also to be considered is the total amount of hours that you can
devote to the correspondence (over the entire time period) which will be
influenced by the number of ladies you are going to contact with reference
to item 1 above. After considering these inputs, I came up with a two
month correspondence time. Is that the ‘optimum?’ Who knows, but it did
work out well for me.
7) Use the experience and advice of others, particularly concerning the
regions of the world. There exist on the Internet various discussion
sites, where guys and (some women) post valuable information about this
'match making' process from the perspective of specific global regions.
Perhaps even more valuable than their 'romantic type' advice, is the value
of their knowledge of travel matters (visa requirements, airplane flights,
trains, buses, hotels, apartment rentals, bed and breakfasts, costs
of most
components, etc.), knowledge about specific cities, etc. Each person may
provide only a small tidbit, but the total tidbits can add up to some very
helpful information; however, you must read through a lot of 'crap' to find
the useful tidbits.
Initial Contacts, Response Rates, Final Numbers, etc.
I made most of my initial contacts through kiss dot com, americansingles
dot com, absoluteagency dot com, udate dot com and friendfinder dot com.
There were a few others on various free sites, etc.
I sent initial contact e-mail messages to over 400 ladies. I had responses
from around 100 ladies and ended up exchanging more than two
messages with 50 of them. I exchanged over 10 messages with more than
30. I met with13. My plan initial plan was to spend one day with each of
14 ladies, and then spend an additional 4 days with each of 3 ladies from
the group of 14. The actual meetings came pretty close to plan, but not
quite exactly like that.
Response rates - This is the one of the most frustrating facets of the
process. The numbers I show above indicate a rate of about 25%. But the
number varied substantially across sites and even for different groups of
ladies that I contacted at different times from the same site. I learned that
there is something I will call the ‘apparent response rate’ and another
concept I will call the ‘actual response rate.’
The difference comes from whether you consider all of the ladies you send
initial contact e-mails to vs those who ACTUALLY READ your initial e-mail.
This difference was vividly demonstrated on the kiss dot com site. There,
they show a table listing your outgoing e-mail and those e-mails that were
actually opened. Typically, less than half of my messages were even
opened by the ladies. Why?, well there could be a thousand reasons. The
absolute site was not as good in providing this info, but that site did kick
back e-mail messages where the ladies no longer had that address. All
the other sites did not have any method of showing you the women who
even looked at your message. So, assuming that the kiss com ‘open’ rate
holds for all sites, the actual response rate in my case might be closer to
50%. But, for whatever reason, it always seemed that the best looking of
the ladies did not even open my e-mail message!!
Final note: This undertaking is, indeed, very very hard work, and something
not to be approached lightly!
Enjoy, Rex
