The Independent has put out an article describing the mail-order bride capital of the world, Odessa, a city that I have spent the past four months in.

They populate Odessa’s numerous terrace cafés, stroll in hordes through its parks, and fill the plush velvet seats of its 19th century opera house. A foreign man, usually though not always over 60 and American, sits with a Ukrainian girl, probably in her twenties and strikingly attractive. Habitually, they are joined by another young woman, the translator, who facilitates the dialogue. “She says she likes a strong man who knows his mind.” “Tell her I love the idea of two cultures coming together in a relationship.” “She says she thinks you could be her soulmate.”

I’ve seen these men in the city. They all congregate at the Guinness Pub on the main drag. Usually they have mustaches and wear bomber jackets. Some of them venture in a bar called Captain Morgan’s, but they don’t usually hit the normal nightlife venues.

As for the Odessan girls, they seem normal to me (by Ukrainian standards). None of tried to milk me. Ukrainian women are most adept at male mineral extraction, so when you toss in naive men who don’t know any better, you know that large sums of money are being tossed into the ether. Their idealistic wife search turns into an impoverishing death spiral.

These bride hunters also have a faulty belief, along with many feminists, that quality women are just begging to come to a dying America. While many do have fantasies of living in the USA, not one quality woman I’ve dated in Ukraine has even hinted to me that she wants to settle in the USA. Moving to the USA is a desperation move that happens to older women (28+) who for whatever reason has lost hope that they will ever get married in Ukraine. In other words, moving to America is not their first choice. Unless the girl is busted and overweight, it never is.

“Everything is possible; there are women who genuinely want to meet a man and emigrate,” says a foreigner living in Odessa who is well acquainted with the dating industry. “In the villages there are even more of them. But there are very few of them in Odessa, these days. Especially those who would be willing to marry a man in his sixties or seventies. They love Odessa, and they can make good money scamming these idiots. Why would they actually go through with it and move to some boring place in rural America?” […] Loading... “She’ll say yes to his proposal, milk him for money for ‘English lessons’ for the next six months, and then disappear,” predicts Alina, when I tell her about Stephen. When he complains to me of the vast sums he is forking out every day for the translator fees, taxi rides, and gifts of Swarovski jewellery, I make gentle suggestions that perhaps all is not what it seems. I smile weakly when he talks of plans to redecorate his house ahead of the arrival of his new wife, and I wonder if I should sit him down and set him to rights. But he is old enough to work things out for himself. I leave him the day before his departure on the way to a karaoke bar, where he plans to propose. […] Indeed, as the tour winds down, even those men who were sent to the depths of despair by dates who did not show up, fleeced them, or led them on, are planning return trips to Ukraine. Some have already been more than once; one of them is on his 14th tour. For some of them, merely the fleeting hope of happiness seems to be enough, while others hold on to a conviction that next time it might just be different.

These men are so lonely that they don’t mind spending thousands of dollars to pass the time with beautiful women without sex. And these are the idiots that guys like me get compared to!

There are so many horror stories from mail-order bride agencies online that I have as much sympathy for these guys as I do for a man getting raped in American divorce court. The secret was long out for anyone with a functioning set of eyes and ears. I must conclude that some men simply want to be led to slaughter.

Is there a solution for these old Western men? Can they just learn game and start approaching girls in the cafe? I’m not sure, but expecting to hand over a pile of cash and get a wife in return reaches a level of stupidity that deserves, at the minimum, a bitch slap.

There is no shortcut to finding a wife. You must display your value through taking social risks in the form of approaches until a connection is cultivated. To think that an agency is going to do it for you because you’ve paid thousands of dollars, and expect any resulting marriage to be successful, is absurd.

She told him that the men are effectively paying to sit at a restaurant with a beautiful woman. If they are naïve enough to think there is a romantic attachment, then that is their problem.

Their problem indeed.

For more advice on having sex with Ukrainian girls, visit Roosh’s article How To Pickup Ukrainian Girls In The Club.

Read Next: What Guys Are Saying About Getting Laid In Ukraine