I’m very pleased to see the following article in Bloomberg after all of the slanted and biased press that Russian and FSU Women seemed to have been getting for such a long time.

March 28 (Bloomberg) — When Nick Wilsdon met his Russian wife, Anna, on the Internet, friends teased him about his mail- order bride. Turns out, he was a mail-order husband.

Three years after first exchanging e-mails with Anna on an online dating site, the Web designer from England’s south coast made the 2,200-mile trek to Ivanovo, Russia’s “City of Brides.” He and Anna are now expecting their first child.

The Ivanovo region has the highest ratio of women to men in Russia, a legacy of the Soviet textile mills that imported female workers from across the country. The city, which once helped marriage bureaus recruit young women for foreign spouses, is now enticing residents to stay and raise families. That’s fuelling a baby boom as Russia struggles to stem a population decline.

Now it’s great to see coverage like this about a particular Russian city but keep in mind that Ivanovo is not the only place with a large ratio imbalance of Women to Men.  You can travel most anywhere in the entire FSU and easily witness this for yourself.

Female Assets

Ivanovo achieved the turnaround by making the most of its biggest asset: women. According to Russian government statistics, 56 percent of the city’s 432,000 people are women.

To encourage them to stay and raise children, the city has doubled the number of subsidized home loans for families, added 1,000 kindergarten spaces in two years, and built a new maternity hospital, says Deputy Mayor Igor Svetushkov.

“We’re not calling ourselves the `City of Women,”’ Svetushkov says. A bride is a “partner for life, a symbol of the family. We’d like to tell people to come here to find their happiness.”

With a population of 432,000 I would consider Ivanovo to be a modest sized city and again there are many other cities in the FSU like this.  56% Women out of 432,000 people means that this city has 241,920 women but I’ve never seen any type of census data that gives you the marital status or the age range of these ladies.

Statistics like this are always interesting but personally I would take any of it with a grain of salt.

Just because you’re in a city with a large population of women doesn’t immediately mean you are going to have an easy time trying to find the right woman to be your wife.

Don’t get me wrong.

Being in a place like this is a great start but the most important thing that I’ve always emphasized is going to a place where you either have an existing social network or at least good potential to try to build one rapidly.

You have no idea how important establishing “Social Proof” through local references and friends are in a traditional environment like this.

Or in other words..  Go with what you know and not with what you necessarily read.

“Advice from an old tracker…  You want to find someone, use your eyes.”  - Captain Mal Reynolds from the film Serenity

This article implies that the city bosses of Ivanovo are realistically facing up to the fact of their declining population and taking the right steps towards dealing with it.   I’m cautiously optimistic about this report and I hope that Ivanovo and other cities like it will do whatever it takes to encourage quality men and women to find each other and to create families there.

Now obviously because there are real shortages of eligible and qualified Men in this part of the world I can only hope that the powers that be dump any nationalistic pride which sees Western Men as rivals in order to address the much deeper issue of population survival itself.

I’m cautious because my time in Russia has taught me that most of what is really happening is not on the surface and there is quite a bit of un-healthy nationalism floating around which loudly discourages these types of unions.

This is the key reason why I’ve said before that the opportunity for you Men to freely do this may only be a temporary window of opportunity.  I can’t prove that this window will close anytime soon but I would certainly encourage all of you to error on the side of caution and not delay this process any more then you have to.

Wilsdon says. “People that come out thinking that they’ll just get a girl here who is going to be indebted to them because they pay for their plane ride to England are going to have a bit of a shock.”

Mr. Wilsdon certainly nailed this point correctly.

And hopefully all of you who have been reading this blog have understood this point for a long time now.

However it’s worth stating again..

Don’t believe any Marriage Agency marketing hype about how “easy” it is to find a Woman who would accept you as her Husband.

Just don’t go there..

In any case I’d like to give my hats off to Bloomberg for posting this story.

I do think it’s interesting that a primarily business news outlet aimed mostly at intelligent business oriented Men would start to give the positive recognition that this relationship trend deserves.

Let’s hope that the rest of the Media follows.