I visit this forum once in 458 yrs and since I got married and lived in RU, I was curious to see what's going on.
I see the same forumers still posting 24/7, i.e. they're neither dating, neither marrying anyone. And they called me a "loser" and gave me "dating advices", which is funny coming from people, whose dating experience is nonexistant, minimal or outdated, from the times of Yeltsin (or even Stalin).
I've warned you that the dating scene is dying, but you're just starting to see it. The number of new marriages is insignificantly low. I see no "just married" posts here and I don't see new kids on the block. Mid-aged couples don't count (I'm not an ageist, but the young ones are the future).
I remember the shady forumers from the dating industry and I ask them: where are your "more family oriented" and "marriage minded" women now? I guess that they're "dying to date foreigners" in the litteral sense lol.
I remember how forumer Anteros tried to trick me into sending him my passport scan via private messages, so he could "shame me" on the forum or blackmail me, but he failed. He once even called me a "poor b***ard" (oh, an irony). Also, TomT
tried to trick me into clicking on his fake women's profiles, so he could get my personal data and pics. He is posting links and if you are logged in into that dating site and if you click them - he'll be able to see your profile. But he failed, too. These guys are not very succesful (to put it politicaly correct). Anteros, by his own admition, had only
one girlfriend and she was bipolar and
he also has a limp. But then I'm the loser.
I guess that they wanted to blackmail me and ruin my chances to find a wife by "shaming me". But no one in the FSU (except few ladies) knows about this forum or about this underworld of intl dating sites and agencies. FSU people just go on with their lives and they're so busy and have so much web content in russian, that no one cares that Tom and Anteros exist. Most people there don't even know english and I have to talk with my wife in ru.
There're also forumers who've been scammed or who've lost their property and even their kids in divorces, but then I'm the loser. Go figure. There were forumers who bragged as if they're womanizers, but I know that they're not dating "Elena's Models poster girls", if you get what I mean. Only few lucky guys can have such women, while most of you has to settle for (under)average ones. Some of you don't get any women at all and you just sit on forums (which is obvious).
I see you, guys, still discussing politics, weather and everything else, except dating and marriage. It's the same as when I left you few yrs ago. But enough about you, let's talk about something interesting. Let's talk about me.
I'm in my early 40s and my wife in her late 20s. We have no kids for now. She's half UA / half RU. She was born in UA, but moved to RU later. She's in contact with her girlfriends from both countries and none of them wants to date a foreigner, be it an American, Canadian, EU, Balkanian, Samoan or Zulu.
This can be also seen on LP or Mamba, where many women state in their profiles that they don't want to date foreigners. Not just Turks or Arabs (the ussual suspects), but any foreigners.
Many foreigners visited the 2018 FIFA World Cup in RU, how many returned home with a bride? Not many. Schengen visas were lifted for Moldovans and Ukrainians, but I don't see many brides in Paris, Barcelona or Cologne. All I see is rapefugees and gypsie pickpockets (nothing racist, just facts). Since there's a war in Donbass, one would logically assume that the local women want to marry abroad, but this is not happening, at least, not on a massive scale.
Most FSUW date locals. Period. And also, there're modern FSUW who prefer to be single and just to have fun with no strings attached or to pursue careers.
Does anyone still buys the myth that there're "more women than men" there? Sure, if you count 70 y.o. babushkas.
Ru statistics say that in the younger age group (up to 34) there're MORE MEN THAN WOMEN. And you still believe that there're "no quality men" in the FSU? Of course there're quality men in the FSU and they're much more quality than say Tom or Anteros. There's a new generation of FSUM, who don't drink so much and they're sporty, ambitious, well travelled, they drive decent cars etc. I'm not saying that everything is perfect (it's NOT), but there're some improvements.
The ru economy improved in the 2000s-2010s and women lost interest in foreigners. This created a sense of pride, tho these improvements are below the western standards and only few major cities could enjoy them, while the rest remained neglected. Now RU has wars, sanctions, devaluation and job cuts, but the dating scene will not go back to the good old days. The women's mentality changed and this can't be reversed. The internet and it's false sense of reality played a role in this, too. Now every village girl can be an Instagram celebrity.
I've no complaints about my wife. She's good, beautiful, hard working and talented. But I'm not like the biased guys who say: "My wife is good - all FSUW are good". That'd be a POSITIVE GENERALISATION. One person cannot represent hundreds of milions of FSUW. Some of them are wonderful, but some are totally messed up, unreliable, cheating, superficial, self-entitled, irrational, too picky & demanding and not so different than their western counterparts.
You put FSUW on a pedestal, but they're just human beings and have flaws. E.g. they might dump you and run after some idiots, who, sadly, will dump them as single mothers. In the FSU, this has epidemical proportions. Whenever some forumer complained about women, you always blamed him and never them. You depict them as a Disney mermaids or retarted children, who are always innocent, as if they're not adults who should take some responsibility.
Now even ru men complain about their women. They even have smth that resembles the
Men's Rights movement (it's fringe, but it grows). I dunno if those guys are losers, misogynists or religious nutcases, but some of their claims hold water.
Ru Youtubers even make soc experiments on dating sites and the results are not good: low responses, rude women etc. There're women posing as "single", but you might find out in say VK that they're taken. As one
Youtuber puts it: FSUW are not desperate to date anyone, MEN ARE DESPERATE. There're more men than women on the sites and the quality of women (looks, intellect) has dropped. 10-15 yrs ago it was better and this is not my rosy retrospection.
You, guys, are also spin doctors. First you act as conservatives and you say: "The West is in decline, the family values are dying, so go East!". Joe the Plumber goes East, but what he sees there is not so different. Some FSUW are promsicous, some are into feminism, LGBT or twerking, some do recreational drugs or put tattoos from their heads to their toes and some are camw**res or содержанки (sponsored women). Joe shares his disappointment on the forum, but then you make a spin and you attack him like triggered feminazis: "You control freak! You want submissive women?! You want to lock them in the kitchen?!".
Once you even compared me to a muslim or a baptist minister, which is ridicilous, just because I questioned the women's "traditionality". But forumers who have positive stories are encouraged to share them and are protected from negative comments. We don't even know if the stories are true. Goebbels would be proud LOL.
You still sell the myth that the FSU is unaffected by the globalisation? And that there's "no feminism" there? The most radical feminist groups now are Pussy Riot from RU and Femen from UA (what an irony). There're feminist, "childfree" and LGBT groups in VK and also swingers, BDSM and what not. You don't have to be Einstein to know it, just search in russian. You can use Google Translate.
Moscow is "pinkier" than you think - as The Guardian puts it and has more gay bars than some western cities. Even
school massacres happen there, just like in the US (e.g. Kerch 10/17/18). There's even a death cult (Blue Whale) that pushes youths into suicide and drugs such as "krokodil" and "spice". So spare me of the story about the "traditionality" of the ru people . They're just people like any other.
I'm sure that you've heard their politicians saying: "We, Russians, have traditional values and after a nuclear war we'll go to Heaven, while the decadent West will just knock the bucket". But after their speeches, they do orgies and coke and they count the stolen money. They own foreign passports, villas in the West and they send their kids to study there. The moral of this story is that there's no morality in it.
They also say that "Americans are dumb", while "Russians are cultured". But not every Russian reads Dostoyevsky and listens to Tchaikovsky. There're plenty of gopniki and unsophisticated people there. And there's a lot of kitsch. Look at Filip Kirkorov! Ru Youtubers
conduct street surveys about geography, history etc. and the respondents are not so smarter than the "dumb Americans". No offense to the Russians, I like their culture, but they have flaws.
I know that many WM are now disilusioned with their countries, but you idealize RU too much. Every country has flaws and the grass is not always greener on the other side.
Living in RU was unpleasant. I had to fiercely argue with the bureaucrats, cause there's no rule of law there, but corruption, arbitrariness (произвол) and rudness (хамство). The locals are not spared either. And this is not new, but it goes back to the czarist and soviet times. Volumes have been written about it, see Gogol, Chekhov, Bulgakov etc.
When I applied for a temporary residence permit (РВП), the bureaucrats broke all their laws and регламенты (regulations). There was also shouting, pushing in endless queues etc. Some procedures can be done on Gosuslugi.ru, but this government-run website is often useless. According to the law, in my case, my РВП was supposed to be ready in 60 days, but I got it after 6 months.
Before I applied for it, I collected info on ru forums, where I saw worrying stories. That's why I printed laws from the internet and I studied them to defend myself like a lawyer in a court. They helped me to argue with the bureaucrats and to debunk their BS. I considered hiring a real lawyer (a lady), but she turned out to be incompetent and greedy, so I never hired her.
Note that I'm Slavic and (nominally) an orthodox christian and I write and think in cyrillic, but this doesn't help. RU mistreats law-abiding foreigners, while it welcomes terrorists and economic migrants from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and other nice places that border Afghanistan. Not all of these people are bad, but still, there are serious problems.
On 02/29/16, the Uzbek nanny Gulchehra Boboqulova
beheaded a 4 y.o. russian girl and waved the severed head around Moscow, shouting "Allahu Akbar!". The police claimed that the woman was "mentally ill" and sent her to a hospital, but ordinary Russians suspect that islamic terrorism gets covered up for PC reasons.
There're so many muslim migrants in Moscow (rus. Moskva) that they block the streets to make
massive street prayers and the city is ironically called Moskvabad. "Abad" is a central asian suffix meaning "city", like Leninabad (Tajikistan), Ashgabat (Turkmenistan), Dzhafarabad (Azerbaijan), Islamabad (Pakistan) etc. And worst of all is that the most dangerous terrorists in RU are not foreigners, but locals (e.g. Chechens).
I was even denied exit from RU (not entry, but exit) when I wanted to travel with my wife for the New Year. The pass control demanded an exit visa from me and issued me a civil infraction. I felt like in a GULAG. If the authorities handed me my РВП on time, this wouldn't happen. We had to spent the New Yr in RU.
And while the authorities wasted time with me, terrorists roamed free. On 12/31/18, an
explosion destroyed a 10 floor residental building in Magnitogorsk and 39 people died. Some media claimed that it was "a gas explosion", but others claimed that it was done by ISIS migrants from the Stans. Just few days later, a new explosion occured in Magnitogorsk, but this time in a microbus (marshrutka). Again, some claimed that it was "just a gas explosion", but some say that this was again a terrorist or a false flag attack.
On New Yrs Eve, I turned on the ru TV. At midnight, I expected some showman with champagne in his hand to say "Happy New Year", but suddenly, the ru anthem played and Putin appeared on the screen with a grumpy face and started a speech. I felt like in North Korea. This is broadcasted every year since the soviet times and it's not new. Then I switched to another channel - Putin again. I switched to another one - Putin again. All the channels showed the same speech.
And then another irony: on New Year's Eve, in Moscow's Gorky Park, at 00:00 AM, exactly when the ru anthem played on loudspeakers, a bridge full of people collapsed and many were injured. The crash happened at the anthem's lyrics: "Glory to you, our free Fatherland" (Славься, Отечество наше свободное).
Catastrophies in RU happen all the time. In Sep 2017, there was a
radioactive leak from the Mayak Nuclear Plant in the Urals (Chernobyl II?). No one knows how many people might die of cancer. In March 2018, a great fire broke out in a mall in Kemerovo,
41 children burned alive. Many Russians blame the owner of the mall and the corrupt officials who allowed him to build it without proper fire prevention. In July 2012, a
biblical flood, caused by poor hydro engineering, destroyed towns in Krasnodar Krai, killing 171. Air disasters occur all the time, the last being the
Aeroflot SU1492 in May 2019, when 41 died. A disastrous food poisoning (echinococcosis) broke out
in the youth military prep school in Ulyanovsk, where many cadets got tapeworms that nibbled through their livers, lungs and even brains.
Me and my wife filed a complaint about my РВП to the ru state organs and after ages she received this reply: "Regarding your mother's residence permit, we would like to inform you that...". Wait a sec, what MOTHER?! It was a madhouse.
I even found out in google that a while ago, the vice-head of my migration office has been arrested for bribery. After many arguments and absurd situations, I finally got the РВП, but I told my wife that we should leave RU. Moving abroad requires preparations, so we lived in RU for a while and then we left.
TomT once called my country a "shithole". But after we moved to Macedonia our lives drastically improved. Some forumers claimed that a ru bride wouldn't be interested in moving there, but my wife adores the place (like all my other foreign guests). There're FSU brides in Macedonia (not millions, but there are) and they fit here well. Тhe number of divorces seems to be close to 0.
I also know Macedonians married to UK, US, AU, DE, Scandinavian, Spanish and strangely, Japanese women. Macedonia is small and not wealthy, but the number of "green card hunters" is 0. My wife is uninterested in my finances and I don't have to pay her to "love me" (unlike some forumers, who've been turned into walking ATMs). Me and my wife both contribute to our household, e.g. she buys the food and I eat it.
Now we enjoy the Macedonian nature (mountains, lakes), the archaelogical sites, the medieval churches, the pictoresque villages, the organic food and the lazy lifestyle. When it's warm, Macedonians sit in outdoor caffes all day long and they gossip, like: "who sleeps with whom", "whose d**k is bigger" etc. The prices of certain products or services in are lower, the cities are smaller and you can get everywhere by foot.
You can explode from eating like Terry Jones in Monthy Python's "Meaning of Life" for €5-10 (grilled meats on coal; salads from real tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers; sheep's cheese; good wine). You can drink yourself to death in clubs for €15-20. You can rent a flat in a walking distance from the capital's center for €150-200-250 (long term), but I own a flat and a house. The historical and touristy city of Ohrid (UNESCO World Heritage Site) and the big Ohrid Lake are just 2.5 h drive from us. The greek Aegean coast is say 3h from us. The Adriatic Sea (Montenegro, Croatia) is a bit further, but it's not a problem.
To be brutally honest, there is: unemployment, corruption, ethnic and religious tensions with the Albanian muslim minority, gypsie beggars, littering, stray dogs, historical disputes with the neighbours etc. But this doesn't affect me and my wife so much, we live well and in a normal mid class area.
Macedonia is reforming, we got rid of the corrupt ex-prime minister, who got a jail sentence and ended up abroad as a fugitive. We're trying to improve, tho it's not easy. There're disappointments, unpopular reforms etc. The economy sucks, but there're Macedonians in AU, CA and the US and they transfer money to their relatives and this helps. The diaspora exists since like 150 yrs ago and it's an important part of our tradition.
We have a pro-EU/NATO policy, but Russians can still visit us without visas, which is useful for my wife. When we went to apply for a res permit for her, I was stressed, but the Macedonian migration officer pat me on the shoulder and said: "Don't worry, bro, everything will be fine". People here are warmer and closer to each other. Sure, there're some idiots, but most people are OK.
He didn't terrorize us, there were no huge forms, no language exams, no medical checks and no endless queues (just 2 Macedonian guys with ru wifes in front of us). In just 15 business days, my wife received her permit. The only problem was that only 1 out of 6 elevators was working in that building and it was full, so me and my wife had to climb 9 floors on foot to the migration office. It's embarrasing, but that's Balkans. After getting the permit, she got a free health insurance.
I'm not saying that everything is perfect. Sometimes there're problems, but that's life. And this is real life and marriage. Not sitting on forums 24/7.