So, the situation is as follows: you chose a trusted dating site a few months ago, found a great girl online, chatting with her for some time, and now, the online dating part is over.
What next? Or, in other words: How to marry a mail order bride?
Meet her in person
Of course, you have to meet her. First, it’s weird to marry a woman you’ve never met in person—it doesn’t matter how good your online communication is; you’ll never truly understand if there’s a spark and chemistry between you while chatting on a dating site. Second, it’s impossible to bring your mail order bride to the United States from the legal point of view: you’ll have to meet her in person within the past 2 years [1]. This doesn’t mean you need to be in a relationship for 2 years prior to the visa application, no; even if you first met her online 2 months ago, it’s still ok. But you must have a real-life meeting, with no exceptions.
So, how to do it right?
First, it would be better to meet her outside the United States. You can arrange a date in her country, or if she lives in a dangerous place (like Ukraine), it could be a third country. If your bride is Ukrainian, you can meet her in Poland, for example. If she’s Colombian, you can meet her in Costa Rica or Uruguay, which are considered the safest countries in Latin America. You’ve got the idea.
Why not bring her to the US? There’s a B-2 (tourist) visa, and it looks like a perfect option for meeting your bride in the US.
Well, it’s not.
The problem here is that B-2 visas can be denied for a bunch of reasons, from an incomplete application to the denial under Section 214(b), which basically means “not strong enough ties of the applicant to their country”—and past B2 denials can have a good chance of influencing the officer to deny her future K-1 (fiance(e)) visa. She can get a tourist visa denial because of a slight problem, and this can affect (and even destroy) all your future plans. It’s just not worth it, to be fair.
So, you’ll have to plan your trip to your bride’s country—this is not the easiest task in the world, but it’s much easier today than a few decades ago thanks to flight and hotel aggregators like Skyscanner, Kayak, Booking, Trivago, and others. With these platforms, you will also be able to save money on your trip, but our #1 advice for those to save money is: to book everything in advance. Airline tickets are cheaper a few months before the flight, and you can save up to 50% if you book your flight in 1 or 2 months.
We also highly recommend planning a date in advance. Thanks to Google, you can now plan literally everything, from the restaurant you’re going to visit to the taxi service you’re going to use. Check the reviews and plan the dates—that’s how you’ll feel more confident and show your bride that you are a responsible and reliable man.
You can also buy her a gift. It’s not about “buying” her or gold-diggers—it’s just that in most mail order bride countries, women love it when men give them gifts on a date. Flowers, perfume, jewelry, it’s up to you to choose.
You can also buy gifts for her parents. Sooner or later, you will have to meet them, especially if we’re talking about “traditional” countries with strong family ties. Buying small gifts is certainly a great idea if you want to make a good first impression. Ask your bride about the gifts for her parents, she knows better than you.
Propose to her
So, you’ve discussed your future, you understand each other, your communication is consistent, you feel like she’s a very important part of your life, and you’re on the same page about your relationship. This means it’s time to propose, of course, only if both you and her are interested in a serious relationship.
You can make a perfect restaurant proposal she probably saw in romantic movies, with the engagement ring served to her and with “your song” played by live musicians. Or, you can make a cool beach proposal. Or a breakfast-in-bed-proposal. There are thousands of options and we won’t tell you which one to choose because, well, you certainly know your bride better than we do. What we can say here is that your proposal must be both memorable and romantic because most mail order brides, from our experience, are very romantic and sensible women.
And remember to take photos. First of all, it’s cool to have a lot of photos from your dates. Second, you’ll need them to convince immigration officers your relationship is real.
Bring her to the United States and marry her, or marry her and bring her to the United States
That’s the most time-consuming and expensive part, but it’s impossible to skip it. All you can do at this stage is do everything right in order to avoid visa decline and extra fees.
So, you have two options here: a K-1 visa and a CR-1 visa. The first one is for brides: you propose to her, she applies, gets her visa, and moves to the US, where you marry her. The second one is for wives: you propose and marry her, she applies, gets her visa, and moves to the US, where you live together till death do you part.
Approximately 18,000 CR-1 visas are issued each year [2], while the number of K-1 visas issued in 2022 is slightly larger (21,351) [3]. There’s no clear leader here; each option is good—for example, those who enter the US on a CR-1 visa can start working right after their arrival, and the K-1 visa is slightly faster to get (10-16 months vs 17-18 months) [4].
Let’s say you choose a K-1 visa—from our experience, it’s more popular among mail order brides. In this case, you will have to:
- Make sure you’re eligible. You must have met your bride in person, be a US citizen, be able to support your bride financially (your income must be 100% of the federal poverty guideline), you must intend to get married within 90 days after your bride’s arrival to the US, etc.
- You file Form I-129F and include all the required documents: passports, pictures together, travel itineraries, letters, emails, sworn statements that explain your relationship, etc.
- Your bride will complete the DS-160 form (visa application) and attend the interview, where she’ll be asked questions about your relationship.
- She’ll be able to arrive in the US—you’ll have to marry her within 90 days.
- After the marriage, she’ll be able to “adjust her status” from a K-1 visa to a marriage-based green card, which means she’ll become a US permanent resident.
Please keep in mind that it’s just a part of the guide, so we didn’t want to spend too much time talking about the visas. If you want to know more about the legality of mail order brides in different countries, the process of getting a visa and VAWA/IMBRA, read this guide—you’ll find all the answers to your questions there. And if you want to know more about how the whole mail order bride thing works, there’s a guide for you, too!
So, you see, there’s nothing too complex about it. Yes, some parts of the plan are pretty time-consuming, and some are not too affordable (it’s the same part, actually), but other than that, there’s nothing difficult here. If you follow all the rules and your relationship is real and genuine, you have nothing to worry about. Just don’t delay your first date—we know that a lot of men are secretly afraid of meeting their online girlfriend in person, and we totally understand it, but that’s not something you should delay.
If you’re using one of those top mail order bride websites and chatting with a real person (only the top sites have an ID verification tool), you don’t need to worry about her using fake photos or hiding her intentions: most users there are real women who are genuinely interested in a serious relationship with a foreigner. Well, you probably know this already.
Written byJohn Millerstone, Author
We decided to create this project because we’re tired of the situation in the industry. 10 years ago, there were like 40% good sites and 60% bad ones. Today, the ratio is more like 10% to 90%, and that’s not how I want it to be. I mean, it kills me that when an American man types “mail order brides” on Google, there is a 90% possibility that he won’t even find a good dating site, let alone find a bride. I want to change that.
Edited byMargarita Zhigalova, Contributing Editor
Two friends of mine wanted to find a husband abroad. They were scammed, lost money, and never got back to that idea. That’s just not right; the situation with these sites needs to change. I believe that we can change that together, and I’m sure that we can help more people find love abroad, exactly like I did!
